PHPRiot.com has a new tutorial today dealing with the creation of "search engine friendly" URLs for your site.

One of the major reasons for using a server-side language such as PHP is for the ability to generate dynamic content. Often this will lead to single scripts that produce their content based on the input parameters (that is, the variables in the URL).

This article covers various techniques and methods for representing these parameters in the URL in a clean and "friendly" manner, as well as then how to read the parameters.

They start off with some examples of what they look like, and move right into how to use the Apache mod_rewrite functionality to take in the URL parameters and map them back to a PHP script. They also use the ForceType keyword in Apache to get the server to parse the URL string correctly. They then wrap it all up with the creation of a custom 404 page to handle the errors that might come up, and a summary of the whole project...

On AjaxDeveloper.org today, there's this new post with a pointer to an Evolt.org article released today about the creation of a login form with Ajax (and some help from PHP).

I started a project on the weekend that I wasn't sure was possible: creating a fully secure "ajax"-powered login system, ideal for blogs, forums, and other similar sites. I had a barebones secure case working within a few hours, and a few more hours gave the final result that I will share today.

They talk about how it's all structured, how the Ajax and PHP work together to make it happen, and what the end result looks like. They also link to a demo of the scripts where you can also download the pieces to get your own login working...

Bright and early Sunday morning, I will be flying off to Boston to attend the GPL version 3 launch at MIT. I am betting on heated discussions and a wild mix of Free Software fanatics, FSF staff from around the world, the Free Culture crowd (EFF, the super awesome Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons staff, ...), corporate lawyers from major vendors (IBM, Intel, Novell, Sun, HP, Microsoft, ..), the Open Source business crowd (MySQL, RedHat, SpikeSource, ...), Open Source people, academics, etc. with one or ten trolls thrown in for good measure. I am also more than a wee bit curious to see how radical (or not) the first public draft of the GPL v3 will be.

The Vancouver PHP User Group has kindly offered to be a guinea pig for my session on copyright, contracts and licenses for software developers. I appreciate the opportunity to refine the presentation, as it will be a bear to get right - first, I have to sure that the audience clearly understands that I am not providing legal advice; second, the topics are complex and difficult to explain concisely. The session is particularly important to get right, as I may be (or am, in a few cases) presenting variants of the session at these events:

• Orbital Lunch and Learn (private event) (confirmed)
• Open Source CMS and Blog Tool Summit (confirmed)
• PHP Quebec Conference 2006 (confirmed)
• MySQL User Conference 2006 (have proposed)
• OSCON 2006 (will propose)
• eZ publish Conference 2006 (will propose, but should be accepted :) )
• International PHP Conference 2006 (will propose)

If you are interested in the topic as well, come on down. The meeting starts at 6:30 and is held in the ActiveState/Sophos building. Be there on time or get left outside the secured building.

Since some others already blogged to be within the first 1000 Zend certified engineers, I feel to raise my 2ct, too. I took the exam during the PHP Quebec conference in Montreal last March. I was actually suprised to pass the exam without any kind of preperation, after Marcus, John and some others convinced my to have a try (it was free there, so I took the chance). At least that shows that you should be able to pass the exam with real-world PHP experience.

Congratulations to Zend for making their certification that public!

I'm sure it's a good marketing thing for them and at least the certification allows employers to devide between real developers and script-kiddies in some ways. For those certifieds I'm actually not sure, the 1000 mark means only good. Maybe the certification exam is to easy? One has to concider that, the more certifieds exist, the more it reduces the "level of professionality" attested for them and the more likely the certification looses it's use for them as their own self-marketing instrument.

Anyway, having a certification in place at all is a good thing. I hope that Zend comes up with a more advanced version of the certification (maybe some "Zend certified PHP wizard"?). This would be a great addition and allow people to show their advanced PHP capabilities. Let me know, if there is going on something in that direction.

So long, happy PHP coding! :)