David Van Couvering has posted about some of his experience with the latest version of the NetBeans editor for some of his PHP and Javascript development work.

Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to help a friend in need who had waded in too deep with a contract he has. He has no database experience, and was trying to customize a Wordpress plugin that uses PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. So I downloaded the daily build of the PHP bundle of NetBeans for 6.5 and started working.

He happily notes that things like syntax highlighting, inline documentation and completion were still there in the PHP bundle as well. He also mentions a few other things that could come in handy for the IDE - ssh tunnel support (see here), an "Add Column Wizard" and a "Insert DLL Wizard".

If you've ever wanted an easy, structured way to create a wizard-type form on your site (ie a multi-step form), then you might want to check out this new tutorial from phpRiot.com today.

There will be many situations when creating web forms, that either you cannot accept all data on one page, either because certain responses result in a different set of subsequent questions, or because you form is so long that you need to split it up into multiple pages.

This tutorial covers how to implement such forms using PHP. This will include covering the various issues that need to be taken into consideration, as well as a class to help build such forms. Finally, there will be real-world example of implementing a multi-page form using the class.

He shows you the creation process using his own "lightweight Wizard class" instead of a standby like PEAR's QuickForm for structural reasons. QuickForm works great for single-page forms, but trips up a bit when it comes to more than one. He talks about considerations you'll need to take, and provides the code for his "ZervWizard class"...