The Symfony blog has announced that their Forms in Action has now been posted online and you can download the first four chapters here.
These chapters covers everything you need to get started. If you are a developer, you can read all chapters, from 1 to 4. If you are more a web designer, then you probably only need to read chapter 3 to learn how to layout forms.
They've also been translated into French and canbefoundhere. Content includes form creation, validation, Propel integration, nested forms, internationalization and some of the bundled widgets and validators that come with the framework.
Michael has posted a simple script today that takes in XML data and spits back out an array on the other side:
The function takes the specified XML data (which must be in valid XML format) and converts into an array. Any attributes in the XML elements are dropped an only the element values are placed in the array.
The code uses a combination of XPath, DOM, and regular expressions to parse the given XML content.
In a new post to the Web Tech blog over on SitePoint, Toby Somerville has posted something he calls "RoughTime" - his method for displaying a more "human friendly" output of a timestamp.
When asked the time, we generally don't need to be military accurate with our response [...] we generally communicate the approximate time. i.e. 'its nearly ten' or 'its just gone half past three'. Yet on the web, time is generally shown as '12:24:13 AM', or similar '" not very visitor friendly.
His RoughTime uses two switch statements to map the hour and minute values to different strings. For example, minutes between 15 and 20 become "quarter past" and the hours are changed over from numeric versions to their word counterparts.
On the Sanisoft blog today, there's a quick tutorial demonstrating how to create a multilingual application with the CakePHP framework:
There are basic two ways to creating a multilingual app in traditional PHP [...] CakePHP V1.2 is the framework which allows you to take the quantum leap of using gettext like functionality with minimum of hassles and at the same time address the common problems which a PHP programmer faces while creating multilingual apps.
They give an example of a simple translation of a sentence (including working with .po files). They show how to integrate the example string, create the .po file with the translation and configure the language to pull the correct phrasing to display to the page.
An update to the German translation to keep it up to date with the latest version released (by Daniel Messer)
You can get these and lots of other translated versions from the tutorial's page on Rob's website. The tutorial has been tested up to version 0.9.1 of the Zend Framework.
In a new blog post, Rob Allen mentions a few different things going on in his life (like work, PHP news, and some on the Zend Framework). He mentions one thing that's great for those speaking Brazillian Portuguese - his Getting Started with the Zend Framework tutorial has been translated into the language.
Saving the biggest news for last, Adler Medrado has translated my tutorial into Brazillian Portuguese! Thank you very much Adler! I've said it before, and no doubt will say it again, I'm still very humbled that people think enough of my little tutorial to translate it. You guys are amazing.
You can grab this and other translations (including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Polish and Italian) from this page on Rob's blog.
That's right, the first open source framework using PHP6 is going to be developed this summer to help the main development of PHP6. I am glad to be the mentor of this very interesting project and looking forward in getting many bug reports, use cases, fixing help, debugging for php6.
The project, being created by Nicolas Bérard-Nault will be working through the following:
E_STRICT compliance
the systematic use of real object programming
Unicode character support
the transparent use of different database types
the use of the most current features available in PECL and PEAR
...and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It will be broken up into three phases to make things a bit easier: planning the new internals, actual development, and testing the work that's been done.
Rob Allen has a quick note that all French speakers out there will be interested to hear:
My tutorial is now available in French thanks to Guillaume Rossolini!
Speaking of course of his Getting Started guide to the Zend Framework. The guide walks you through the installation, structure, setup, and creation of a simple application within the framework (displaying/updating/adding to an album listing).
In this post from his blog, Mike Naberezny has a quick note about some updates that have been made to the Zend Framework manual.
For those of you who are interested in browsing the Zend Framework manual online, I've made some improvements to the interface that will make it more enjoyable: http://framework.zend.com/manual/
There's no question that the excellent manual at php.net is a big reason that PHP is so easy to use. We recognize this and documentation has been very important to the Zend Framework project from the first day. We aim to always have the highest quality documentation possible, and to make it as accessible as possible by publishing it in multiple formats.
Documentation is definitly a key for any project - especially for a project where the primary developers are already used to one of the best online manuals of any projects. Right now, the Framework ships with an HTML version of the manual, but there are plans for a PDF version as well. There are also volunteers that are working already to get it into other languages as quickly as possible.
