In this new tutorial from Tizag.com, they walk you through one of the more basic (yet most looked for) tutorials for beginning PHP developers - a PHP HTML form example.

Use this example as a form walkthrough. We will briefly build an HTML form, and call the form data using PHP. PHP offers several methods for achieving this goal, so feel free to substitute alternative methods as you follow along. Our example will show you a method using a single .php file, combining both PHP and HTML in one simple text file, to retrieve the data and display the results.

Below is a quick review of bullets, check boxes, text fields, and input fields and using them to build a form to retrieve some personal information about our user.

True to the overview, they look at the various types of input fields you'll want to use - textbox, radio button, checkbox, textareas, etc. Finally, they tie it all back together with the complete form you've built (from the example parts), showing how to grab the contents of the form back once submitted (superglobals make it a snap).

Continuing on with their "mysqli in PHP5" series, DevShed has posted part two highlighting the commit and rollback functions - their use and functionality.

This is the second part of the series "Using mysqli with PHP 5." Welcome back. In three tutorials, this series shows how to use the most important methods and properties included in the "mysqli" extension that comes with PHP 5, in order to take advantage of the new features bundled with MySQL 4.1 and above.

In part one they introduced the extension, providing the background for those just joining in. In this latest part, they take it to the next level and talk about these new handy functions - one to save the updates/additions you're making to the database and the other to undo those changes quickly and easily. As always, there's plenty of examples, explainations, and code to go around.

PHPit.net has posted a pretty positive review of one of Packt Publishing's latest offerings, "Smarty PHP Template Programming and Applications".

Smarty is one of the most popular templating systems for PHP, and it offers so much functionality that it certainly deserves its own book. Read on to learn more about this book.

This book is targeted towards two types of people: designers and developers, and it's hardly surprising that the book has been divided into a designer part and a developer part.

According to the review, the authors - Lucian Gheorghe, Hasin Hayder, Joäo Prado Maia - have put together a good, solid book on using Smarty. The seperation of the designer and developer parts also make it valuable as two books in one. There's talk of why you should use Smarty, building templates, some real-world examples, and the use of modifiers and functions.

In this new post on the ThinkPHP blog, Jason Easter demonstrates how, with the help of the PDFlib library for PHP, you can create "press-ready PDF documents" whenever you need to (including barcodes).

Often people would like to create a PDF in offset quality out of a big bunch of addresses and create a barcode for each address. Sure, you could do this using the serial-letter-function in Word or any PHP library - the problem is that you have to stick to special standards, e. g. using CMYK colorspace and the like.

There may be other good solutions for that. Anyway, now let's talk about doing that by using PDFLib - in the lite (and therefor free) version.

His example uses the "lite" version of the library and JPGraph to create the barcodes. They create the barcode first (from a value passed in the $_GET string), then insert it into the PDF defined by the code they provide. They even show how to add additional text and an image to round out the look of the newly minted PDF.

In last tutorial have explained how to fetch eZ publish content objects with PHP. In this post I will show how to access eZ publish content objects attributes of all available datatypes. For testing PHP code we will re-use the same CLI script. This example you can re-use in your custom modules, cron jobs scripts, etc.
Thank you for Kristian Hole for his initial idea.

From Rob Richards comes some news on new XML features in PHP 5.2, as well as some help on using WSSE with ext/soap.

XML Canonicaliztion functions C14N() and C14NFile() have been added to DOM for PHP 5.2. Until this is released, I wrote some functionality to perform basic exclusive canonical XML (So far it has worked fine with all the Soap services implemeting WSSE I have encountered as well as XML using XMLDSIG). When used within a system running PHP 5.2 it will use the functionality built into the DOM extension rather than the custom implementation.

Its great to see he is taking the time to port functionality back to PHP 5.1.x in userland, and yet, when the functionatility is available through the XML extension it is used instead. Great job.

I'll be speaking at php|works (September 12-14) on a couple of subjects. The first talk I will do is on input filtering, especially going into the new filter extension but also covering some other forms as well. The conference also features the return of "Derick's Ranting Hour" where I invite the audience to come up with subjects regrading what they hate and love about PHP. The third session I will give is on the eZ components introducing the cool new things that we've added, and will be adding, for the next version. Hope to see you there!