After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components. You will learn all necessary basics to get started with eZ components supported development and get to know some interessting components, based on a simple example application. The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 impotant components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail. I consider those as 2 of our most important and impressive components, so this looks very promissing. Beside that, the 2nd session will cover more components, that are not shown in the first part.

eZ components I	2004-09-04, 15:00 - 16:30 CEST
eZ components II	2004-09-06, 15:00 - 16:30 CEST

Since dynamic-webpages.de is a German website, the sessions will again be in German language. If you are interessted, you can simply register for taking part on dynamic-webpages.de and join us. It would be quite cool, to offer those sessions to an international audience, too. So, if you provide online seminars in a similar way, feel free to contact me about this!

Thanks a lot to dynamic-webpages.de for sponsoring the equipment and bandwidth again and to eZ systems for sponsoring my efforts!

Users of the site Digg will know how the commenting works. It allows you, through a series of Ajax calls and other information, to edit the comments that you've made for a certain amount of time right on the page. It's a handy feature, and in this new posting over on Spindrop.us, they show you how to create it (with the help of symfony).

It's pretty straight forward. For all of your posted comments you check if the owner of them is viewing them within 3 minutes of posting the commen. 3 minutes is usually enough time to notice you made a typo, but if you disagree I'll leave it to you to figure out how to adjust the code.

For example, I make a comment, realize I spelled something wrong and then I can click on my comment to edit it. Of course using AJAX means this all happens without having to reload the web page. Therefore the edits are seemingly quick. So let's add it to any web site.

He steps you through the process, first creating the DIV for the each of the comments, then some Javascript to make it editable. He then creates a timer to monitor how long it's been since the comment to limit the editing to three minutes. Finally, the code bits to load the text from the database and to save the text back in once it's been edited.

On his blog today, Ammar Ibrahim relays a story of how the Mail component from the eZ component frameowrk "saved the day" for a project he was working on.

A few days ago I was asked to develop a simple script for a solidarity campaign. The idea is that people send their photos as attachements to some email. The script would download all images attached and insert a record for that in the database.

I got introduced to eZ components during my last visit to Norway to attend the eZ systems conference. I decided to give it a shot, and oh boy it's just amazing, probably the cleanest and simplest API ever.

The Mail attachment provided all that he needed, and he includes the script (about 50 lines long) that he used to fetch the emails. He did have one issue with the ability to fetch a single email with the tool, but he managed to hack around it (script included as well).

KillerPHP.com has posted another new video targeted at web designers today, explaining the basics of how form processing works with PHP.

In this video, I review a few key aspects about forms that relate directly to form processing with PHP. I cover these three attributes:

• The 'action' attribute
• The 'method' attribute
• The 'name' attribute

In part 2, we will get into practical examples.

This video is a part of a series he's producing to provide a foundation for the non-programmer types in PHP (without scaring them off).

A few months ago, while at the eZ systems summer conference, I was showing my focus deck to my friends Tony Wood and James Eichhorn. I promised to blog about it, but have taken a very long time to get to it. So, here's the deal: I have a simple and effective trick for keeping focused on the tasks at hand, even when facing lots of interruptions (such as instant messages, phone calls, people dropping into my office, lots of meetings, etc.) and while having the attention span of a gnat.

Following up on some of his previous posts to the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks has posted this quick guide with some "hot UTF-8 tips" to share with the community.

As a result of all the noise about UTF-8, got an email from Marek Gayer with some very smart tips on handling UTF-8. What follows is a discussion illustrating what happens when you get obsessed with performance and optimizations (be warned - may be boring, depending on your perspective).

He talks mainly about using the native PHP functionality to avoid the mbstring issues that could arise by restricting locale behavior and using a fast case conversion function to handle strings correctly. The other tip involves delivery methods to those not able to recieve UTF-8 formatted content - checking their character set and responding accordingly.

I’m planning to write a script for importing my bookmarks into an eZ publish site. Simpy is a great service (searching is based on Apache Lucene) but it is often crawling under heavy traffic when I really need it. In the meantime my Firefox bookmarks list keeps growing and growing, altough I hardly can’t find [...]

Taking the next step in the series, Joshua Eichorn has posted part two of the "Adding Ajax to a Website step by step" series today, a continuation from this previous post.

I have a lot more change's i'd like to make to webthumb so the last article (Adding AJAX to a website step by step) is now the start of the series. In this article will be taking front page of webthumb and making it live. The the stats and recent thumbnails will update in real time, making for a nice slick presentation.

I hope to release and article for each improvement I make to webthumb, giving everyone idea of whats involved in AJAXing a real website. But a series of articles won't cover everything you want to know about AJAX.

The focus in this new post is his method of grabbing the latest information from the server without a needless page reload. In this case, that means grabbing the latest thumbnails that have been created.

He includes the code for the different parts: exporting the PHP class to allow the Javascript to access it, a sample response from the HTML_AJAX server and the server code itself. From there, it's back to the client side for the Javascript code to make the request (and set a timer on it) and updating the page with the latest content. There's also a brief mention of how HTML_AJAX can push out other Javascript libraries, which he uses to push moo.fx for a transition effect on the thumbnails.

Builder.com has a new tutorial posted today about the use of the PEAR Net_GeoIP package to help with the geo-location of the visitors to your website.

Ever wondered how sites like Google and Yahoo! always seem to know which country you're in, and automatically redirect you to the most appropriate country sub-site? Or how some Web sites display advertisements perfectly targeted to your city or region? Well, it isn't magic -- these sites are simply mapping your IP address to a geographical database to identify your location, and then using this information to send you precisely-targeted data.

They work through the steps to get it up and working - the installation, a few basic code examples to show how to use it, and a full example of how to target different areas with different kinds of ads (geographically-targeted advertising).

In this new blog post today, Christopher Jones mentions a few different things, but it's the PHP-related items that are of interest particularly.

The first is a brief mention of a new PHP book from Mladen Gogala titled "Easy Oracle PHP". Christopher notes that it is now available for order. Check out the book's website for more information on that.

The second mention in the post is of the merging of the code support for Oracle's NCLOB datatype into the latest PHP 5.2 version. For more information on this datatype, check out this entry in an Oracle manual.