In a recent post to his blog Christoph Dorn shows off a cool little trick to getting your Mac to respond to your (vocal) request for website stats from FeedBurner.

You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.

New on the KillerPHP blog today is a video tutorial by Stefan Mischook that introduces some of the key concepts and code required to make a simple cart.

I just released a new PHP shopping cart video tutorial for beginners. In this series of videos, you learn how to build a PHP based shopping cart that works with Paypal.

The result is an object-oriented cart script that can interface with PayPal via XML messages. You can find other great video tutorials in the PHP videos section of the site.

Lorna Mitchell has posted the last part of her development process towards creating a sample REST server in PHP:

This is part 3 of my article about writing a restful service server. If you haven't already, you might like to read part 1 (covering the core library and grabbing the information we need from the incoming request) and part 2 (covering the service handler itself) before reading this section. This part covers the Response object that I used to return the data to the user in the correct format.

She show how she created the object to push the response back out to the client with an output() method that displays the XML response in a manually generated format.

Chris Hartjes has answered some more questions his readers have asked in a new post to his blog today. This time the focus is on XML handling.

Welcome to the 3rd installment of me answering reader feedback questions. Today we deal with a topic that I deal with every day at my day job - working with XML in PHP.

He talks about SimpleXML (and how well it does its job) and their (his work's) current method of handling the storage of XML in a database. He describes both their current process and his ideal one, how he'd want to interface with their eXist backend.

Christian Weiske has a quick tip on how to get larger XML files to pull into PHP5 and be usable:

At work I had the task to implement the synchronization between an online shop and a commodity management system. Data exchange format was XML - one big XML file for all of the products (some thousands with dozens of attributes). Big question: How do I import the file in a way that is most convenient for me as a programmer - and without exceeding the machine's RAM when loading a 1 GiB file?

The newer alternatives both use the same technology (DOM and SimpleXML - with DOM behind it) so he goes more "low tech" than that and opts for the XMLReader extension to pull in the large amounts of data. Available in PHP5, the XMLReader extension, which he combines with an Iterator from the SPL to makes for a simple, quick little parser.

Stefan Koopmanschap had a problem - adding a link to a Zend Framework form (Zend_Form) built from an XML definition:

I was quickly told by the friendly people in #php_bnl on irc.freenode.net that I needed to use Decorators for that, so I went diving into the documentation. Reading the official documentation, I couldn't really get into how exactly the decorators worked and what I could do with them.

It was this article on the Zend Developer Zone that helped him the most, though. He explains his solution, defining the Decorator with a setDecorator method call, and includes the one-liner that made it work.

In trying to convert over several HTML pages to the DITA XML format, James Edwards came up against a problem involving recursion:

But a problem I came across several times was the sheer complexity of recursive element conversion '" <code> becomes <jsvalue> (or one of a dozen similar elements), <a> becomes <xref> '¦ and that's all simple enough; but each of these elements might contain the other, or further child elements like <em>, and as we walk through the DOM so the incidence of potential recursion increases, until it gets to the point where my brain explodes.

His solution involves working with both regular expressions and document fragments. He loads the node he wants to work with, its parsed to prepare it and is passed off to do the "text-based mangling" to update it. The result is them pushed back into an XML object (fragment) and this is pushed back into the main document with a replaceChild call.

Lukas Smith recently posted about issues he's been coming across with the "KISS" mentality (and code) that the Zend Framework implements, specifically for the Zend_Feed component.

Now that I am actually using the Zend Framework on my first project, hitting bugs/limitations in Zend_Feed and therefore looking at the code, I must say I am seeing feature duplication with internal PHP features that does not quite fit in with the KISS principle.

He points out a few things that illustrate his point - the use of Zend_Http_Client instead of a strea context, passing XML contents into loadXML instead of just load. As a replacement, he's considered a Feed component from the eZ components system, but it hasn't been released (officially) yet. So, as an alternative, he's come up with a patch to fix a few things in the Zend_Feed component to make it a bit more KISS-friendly.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Stephanie Ehrling has posted about a method for PHP to take in the output of the Nike+ equipment and put it into a usable form.

There is no official API that allows you to use the raw data. Nevertheless the data are sent to the Flash via XML so there is a chance to use them. For PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself has implemented a class to access these data. The class allows to authenticate a user and fetch the running data of a user in a XML-Format

She gives an example of it in action - simple creation of an object then a call with the username and password. Behind the scenes, the data is pulled in and dropped into a SimpleXML object that includes total distance, total calories burned and data on the most recent run.

In a new post on the IBM developerWorks page, Nathan Good takes a look at some of the features of the up and coming versions of the PHP language including things like namespaces, changes in the XML handling and a few things taken out.

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

New features he mentions include namespace support, improvements to the native Unicode support as well as a few of the things that will be permanently retired like the php.ini settings for magic_quotes and register_globals.