Web Portal

Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.

I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.

Some of the updates include:

One column design instead of the 2 column design
Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts
The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn’t highlight deprecated packages anymore
Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts
The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks!
Patch uploading during ticket creation now works

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I’ve enabled pretty URLs in Wordpress. It appears that has caused all articles to reappear on planet PHP with today as date. This was not my intention.

Only ‘How I PHP: Exceptions with Interfaces’ is a new article, the others are old ones.

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The Developer Tutorials site has posted a new article covering the creation of a small application that can help you scrape content from a remote page and pull it into your script.

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a PHP script that scrapes links from any web page.

You’ll learn to use cURL, the DOM functions, XPath and a bit of MySQL to get the job done. It’s nice to see that they also include a section looking at one of the more touchy aspects of web page scraping - “is it legal?”

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Idiocracy is a disturbing movie about marketing leading to a dumbing down of society. In many ways, marketing seems to be heading down that path.

Using Twitter today made me further appreciate something Nick Carr mentioned, that as we use computers more we begin to think and act like computers. Short bursts. Logical but detached. Devoid of context. Always engaged in something, never fully engaged. Doing whatever is in front of us, etc.

With marketing being so easy to implement and measure, and every creator (and their dog) learning public relations, every day the web is becoming a bit more like the Guinness Book of World Records. This corn flake sold for $1,350 and this lady was stuck on her toilet for two years. And both of those stories were featured on CNN!

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This post is pretty much a revamp of a previous post called “Working with X-Fire soap services and inheritance in PHP“. That title was a bit misleading, and not really that good when it came to providing a sample.

Let’s say we have a SOAP method called createCustomer(Customer c), and we have a base class called Customer, which has to subclasses, Person and Organization. Person has firstname, lastname, while Organization as orgname and orgid. Now, the createCustomer call accepts a object of the class Customer, and any derived classes.

When retrieving a Person / Organization over SOAP, PHP automatically creates instances of the correct classes, but when calling createCustomer, passing a Person / Organization it breaks. Out object is sent as a Customer, but with Person or Organization fields added. The SOAP server expects to find a xsi:type for the object we are sending to tell what kind of Customer it is. It seems like PHP does not set this itself (maybe it should?).

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Can StumbleUpon Increase Your Link Juice?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of March , 2008 at 10:02 am

Jane Copeland wrote an interesting blog post about StumbleUpon traffic. I like what she has to say and I didn’t know that StumbleUpon revisited a website more than once. That’s good to know.

While StumbleUpon doesn’t give Search Engine Optimization link juice, it can increase your chances of getting link juice if you play it right. What you want is to encourage others to link to you, but how do you do that? If people are always Stumbling and not linking then are you really getting any benefit? I guess the key is to appeal to people who have not yet discovered your site and might want to link to you because 1) they really like what you offer and 2) they are in the same niche as you.

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Es gibt ein neues Magazin fr PHP namens “PHP Journal”.
Heute ist es an der Zeit, die Ausgabe Januar/Februar 2008
unter die Lupe zu nehmen.

Schon der Name ist so wichtig, dass er auf dem Logo gleich
zweimal abgebildet werden musste, horizontal und vertikal:

Auf der StartTitelseite spring einem gleich
einer der Artikel ins Auge: “Webdesign mit Ajax”.
Da ich noch nie Fan von -Tags oder CSS war, ich meine
Seiten aber trotzdem schn und stylisch haben mchte, ist dieser
Artikeltitel quasi die Offenbarung. Schalten wir gleich um auf
Seite 52, “Eine eigene Ajax-Engine entwickeln”.

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Ivo Jansch has posted his review of the php|architect book about the Zend Framework by Cal Evans:

Before I voice my opinion, a disclaimer: I have met Cal personally; in fact I’m having diner with him next Monday, I’m writing a book for php|architect, and my company is a Zend partner. I could not be any more biased. If you still trust my judgement (and I will try to remain objective), read on.

Ivo mentions the important things - like how fun the book is to read (a book about a framework, who knew?) and what sort of things it covers. Components of the framework are mentioned but so are things like caching, layouts and web services. I’d give away the ending but that wouldn’t be any fun so go check out his unbiased opinion of hos the book turned out.