On the php|architect A/R/T article repository today, there's two new articles posted, both on the same topic - "Using the PEAR Installer" - parts one and two (as written by Tobias Schlitt).

In part one, he introduces the PEAR installer - how it works, how to use it, and what you'll need to get started. He gives sample commands to pull in new package information and discover new PEAR channels. He even includes a sample application to get you started with the basics and to have something to follow along with in the packaging process.

In part two he picks right back up from the previous part, focusing this time on the post-install functionality of the installer - using the scripts to set variables and information up following the extraction of the application. Code examples are included, and the "final steps" of creating the package are given. In the end, you should have a nicely little bundled set of scripts with a simple, powerful post-installation setup.

As the CakePHP framework grows in popularity, more and more tutorials are show up for it, including this quick and handy one from Graham Bird. In it, he explains the use of "slugs" instead of IDs to make URLs simpler to use and remember.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use words rather than IDs in your Cake URLs. These words are known as "slugs" in Wordpress so I decided to call them slugs too.

Cake's normal URLs look like this: www.example.com/stories/read/123245221
and we are going to make them look like this: www.example.com/stories/read/sleepingbeauty

Thanks to the simplicity of the framework, the tutorial is pretty short, using one of CakePHP's "magic functions" to help cross-match the slug given with a table in the database with a slug/title relationship. There's not much code to it and he provides a demo

On the KillerSoft blog today, there's a few comments from Clay Loveless about his trial of Textmate, specifically when dealing with phpDocumentor comment blocks.

I've been a BBEdit user for a decade, and despite my switch to Zend Studio last fall for the bulk of my PHP development, I still find myself going to plain text editors for little tweaks, or less formal "hack it out" efforts.

There are a few things that I've grown very accustomed to as a Zend Studio user over the past several months. One of those is typing "/**" in a PHP document and having a full phpDocumentor docblock appear magically, with the cursor insertion point set on the first line of the comment area.

Unfortunately, TextMate doesn't handle it quite that way, but he's found a similar way to accomplish it - using "doc_cp" followed by a TAB. It doesn't quite handle the preformatted blocks as well as Zend's software does, but that's nothing the scripting features of TextMate can't take care of - he shows you how.

From Sonspring.com, there's a quick tutorial on a simple way to make "time-sensitive CSS" for your site.

Recently, there's been some discussion on the Godbit forum about how to serve dynamic, time sensitive CSS with PHP. I got to thinking, and the steps necessary to make this work are actually pretty easy. First off, let me say that most hardcore programmers will probably scoff at the simplicity of these examples. However, a hardcore programmer I am not, so basic tutorials are what I enjoy. Also, please know that this is not an exercise in JavaScript / Ajax. It is simply a way to provide unique CSS based on date and time.

They include examples of what the result of the code is for two different methods - the month-based CSS and the PHP + CSS Clock approaches. Their examples are just the sample uses of the code, but they also make each available for download. Check out all of the comments for even more tips!

DevShed has posted the third and final part of their "Serializing Objects in PHP" series today with a focus on integrating all of their previous code with a MySQL database.

Provided that you've already grasped the key concepts about object serialization, in addition to implementing some advanced features, such as the ones I mentioned right at the beginning of this article, in this final installment of the series, I'll show you some examples of how to work with objects and sessions. I'll also show you how to use MySQL tables to keep your objects safe and healthy.

They briefly touch on the code from the previous part, showing how to automatically serialize the objects easily. With that in place, they illustrate how to expand upon it, to combine these objects with sessions to register/store/retrieve them. Finally, they cover taking these same objects and storing them to a database (MySQL), including an example of handling user information.

PHPit.net is back again today with yet another great tutorial. This time, they help you create a class to manage the settings for your application that not only supports plain-text, but INI, XML, and YAML formats as well.

A config.php or a settings.xml file is a very common thing for most PHP scripts, and it's usually where all the script settings (e.g. database information) are stored. The easiest way is to simply use a simple PHP script as a config file, but this may not be the best way, and it's certainly not the most user-friendly way.

In this tutorial we'll have a look at creating a Settings class which can handle any type of config format. I'll take you through the steps necessary to handle four different formats (PHP, INI, XML and YAML), but it's very easy to add more formats.

To start, they build the base class before quickly adding the get() and load() functions to pull in the external content. First on the list, they extend the base and make a pure PHP implementation holding the settings. Following that, they move on to the INI format, using PHP's parse_ini_file function to make it simple.

Last but not least, they venture into something a bit more complex - working with XML and the YAML formats to create this simple, handy tool.