Manuel Lemos has posted a new book review of one of the latest offerings from Packt Publishing, "Smarty PHP Template Programming and Applications".

PHP template engines have always been an hot topic. I guess it is accurate to say there are hundreds of PHP classes and scripts that implement template engines. Smarty is by far the most popular PHP template engine. I suppose it is fair to say that the history of PHP template engine can be split in "before Smarty" and "after Smarty".

This book was written having in mind two types of audience: the Web page designers and the Web application programmers. After a couple of introductory chapters, there are several chapters written for Web page designers followed by several chapters more for Web application programmers.

He goes on to describe the structure of the book, how it compares Smarty to other templating systems, an introduction to using Smarty, and a few chapters diving more into the topic in depth. Overall, his comments are positive, and he definitely recommends the book to anyone looking to get into this popular templating system.

DevShed continues their "Using SimpleXML in PHP5" series today with a bit more complex look (part two) at loading in preexisting XML strings to be manipulated.

Are you looking forward to learning about loading XML data strings, as well as searching and accessing nodes? Then this is the tutorial you've been waiting for since last week! Welcome to the second part of the series "Working with simpleXML in PHP 5." This three-part series introduces the most important features of the "simpleXML" extension that comes with PHP 5, and shows by several hands-on examples how to implement the handy set of XML-parsing functions that are included in this library.

They start by demonstrating the simplexml_load_string functionality to simply grab the data and follow it with a method to pull out just the data you need from the resulting object. Finally, they help you construct an XMLParser class to show a more object-oriented approach to performing the same tasks.

Amir Saied has a quick blog post today concerning a library he feels has gotten overlooked yet is quite useful, especially in his situation.

Well, here I'm going to write about a great library that didn't get enough attention as it deserves, I mean Net_SmartIRC, is a complete library that conforms to the RFC 2812 (IRC protocol).

This library is enough for writing a bot but there's also a great framework (phpbitch) that has more features to and writing new modules for it isn't a pain..

Not only does Net_SmartIRC boast an impressive list of features, but the phpbitch application based on it already has several modules that come bundled with it, including an interface to Google, logging abilities, user management, and a PHP manual search.

On the All Forces blog today, Melvin Rivera has posted a new tutorial for all of those WordPress users out there wanting to make a custom database error message page.

The database connection error occurs when WordPress tries o connect to the database but does not succeed at it. When you are first installing WordPress, it can mean that your settings are incorrect. i.e. the username/password are wrong. However, if your WordPress installation is running smoothly but for some reason MySQL goes down on your server then WordPress will show that huge "WordPress, Error Establishing a Database Connection" error page that looks nothing like the rest of your site.

The error page is great when you are first setting up WordPress but it is not the most ideal for a professional website. It creates confusion for the visitor that might not even know what WordPress is. What's worst, the web developer might not even find out for hours.

He guides you through making a small modification to WordPress itself (to change the page location), including the exact code to change. He also includes a brief it of PHP code to place on this custom page to email you whenever it hits this page (so you'll know it's down). From there, it's just about creating the custom error page that fits into your template. And, of course, he suggests testing it briefly, just to ensure that everything's on the up and up. Files are included where code was referenced.

So, finally it's time for going to our yearly eZ publish Conference. I'm really much looking forward to this event, because it is the first time for me, that I get the opportunity to really get to know the whole company stuff at once. Surely, I know all the people from Germany and most of the people in the headquarter personally, but to most of the people from the Nordic (Oslo), Ukrain (Odessa), France (Lyon) and North American (Vancouver) offices I only had email contact. Beside that, it will be a great event, because a lot of PHP and eZ publish community people will be there.

Sadly me and Kore will not be able to attend the PHP Vikinger event, which takes place directly after the conference, but in chargeback we will have anothe great event then, the first Free and OpenSource Conference in Bonn.

Anyway, tonight at 2:00 we will meet at Kores place to drive to Frankfurt Hahn airport, where our flight to Oslo Torp will leave at 7:00 tomorrow. I'll be back on Friday around 16:00 and on Saturday morning the FrOSCon? starts. So, a busy week is going to start right now... Looking forward to seeing some of you out there during the week! Cheers! Toby.

Derick Rethans has two blog posts for us today, the first details a patch he created which allows us to use type hints for all variable types in PHP.

Derick himself admits that its probably not the best approach:

The patch is most likely not the best way of implementing this either, and I am also not sure if this patch should be applied to PHP's CVS at all.

He offers the following as an example of how this would be used:

function foo2( integer $i, float $f, bool $b ) { }
foo2( 'string', 42, 49.9 );

The example above should show:

Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to foo2() must be of type integer, string given, called in /tmp/test.php on line 16 and defined in /tmp/test.php on line 12

Derick also posted his Database Design Slides from his talk earlier this year at php|architects php|tek

An attendee at the PHP New York Conference asked me on some tips on how to implement typehinting for scalar types (integer, float, string, boolean...). In about 20 minutes I explained how it could be done, but I got a bit bored at my flight back so I finished the patch already. The patch is most likely not the best way of implementing this either, and I am also not sure if this patch should be applied to PHP's CVS at all. It might be useful for people that have more control over their PHP setup so I decided to publish it here instead.

Besides the four scalar types it also allows the "object" type hint which will allow objects of any class to be passed. A small example is here:

<?php
class blah {
}
function foo1( object $a )
{
}
$b = new blah;
foo1( $b );
function foo2( integer $i, float $f, bool $b )
{
}
foo2( 'string', 42, 49.9 );

The example above should show:

Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to foo2() must be of type integer, string given, called in /tmp/test.php on line 16 and defined in /tmp/test.php on line 12

I finally managed to create a PDF of my database design tutorial that I gave at php|tek earlier this year. You can as usual find that on my talks page.

Another week has been passed and it is time for another update on eZ's activities. The biggest news this week is that we have released a stable version of eZ components 1.1. Also, read about the updated eZ publish 3.9 feature request list and a new article about the eZ publish 3.8 clustering feature. The newsletter also includes an update on the current bug status.

The slides for my presentation on Xdebug from the New York PHP Conference can be found on my talks page.