Everyone and everything is connected these days, it seems like. One of the keys to these connections is the use of things like RSS (really simple syndication) feeds to share your site's contents with the world. Don't have one yet? No worries, this tutorial from The Shadow Fox Network can help you create one.

It's a pretty simple script - pulls from the database, loops through the results, and formats it into the RSS standardized format. All of the PHP and XML formatting that you'll need is given.

IBM developerWorks has posted the second part of their series covering the development of PHP and Ajax to create a photo gallery application. In this part, they work off of the gallery already created in part one, taking care of one issue that plagues Ajax application - the breaking of the back button.

They start with a look at what it means to "save state" in the browser, including the use of the Back button to navigate between pages. Seeing that Ajax breaks this, they move ahead with a simple solution - creating an internal history stact for the application and use its own navigation methods. They provide some examples images to use and all of the code you'll need to accomplish this.

They create a class using the popular Prototype javascript library to create functions like do_add, do_back, and do_forward to correctly handle the adding and deleting of the items from the stack. Once that script is developed, they take and integrate it back with the photo gallery from part one.

PHPBuilder.com has posted the next part of their "Using XML" series - this time with a focus on SOAP and WSDL.

They start with an overview of what SOAP is and how a simple SOAP message is structured. They also expand on that one step further with an example of a remote procedure call in a SOAP message.

Since the foundations are in place, they zip right along to the use of SOAP in your PHP 5 installation (one of the easiest methods). They help you create the SOAP client, generate the PHP code automatically from the remote WSDL, and utilize a proxy class to handle the connection.

With these scripts, they provide two examples of how to put them to work - one requests books on the topics of "php5" and "oop" from Amazon's web service and the other works with Google's API to "race" the results of certain search terms.

Matthew O'Phinney has created yet another tutorial surrounding the Cgiapp2software and looks this time at something he calls "pluggable applications".

He gives the example of needing a method for creating a well-structured layout in his appication, but also needing a sitewide template to apply to it. Traditional methods don't quite lend themselves to that, so he introduces a new function, cgiapp_postrun, to apply the template after the logic is through.

He includes two examples, one demonstrating the above mentioned situation and the other showing how to make a flexible method for including authentication in only certain parts of the application and not others. Both define a postrun() function to handle the changes to be made after the rest of the logic has finished.

One struggle seems to come up over and over again for several PHP developers out there - Oracle issues. Newsgroups and message boards are filled with questions and, sometimes, a few answers. bshensky is one such user - but one that found a way to get the PEAR DB package to connect to Oracle simply and without the usual recompile it would take to get the Oracle drivers successfully installed.

The document claimed that you could use PDO to load a database driver on the fly without the need for a recompile. All bshensky saw left to do was getting PDO installed (via PEAR) and getting it to pick up on the Oracle libraryes to help make the connection. A few quick commands and environment variables later, he had a complete and working PHP install with Oracle functionality called on the fly.

Codewalkers.com has a new tutorial posted today showing the creation of a CAPTCHA image with PHP.

They start with a look at how CAPTCHAs work before even looking at the code. The next steps include the creation of the random string of characters and placing them in the image (with a standard background in this case). The image is built with the GD functionality in PHP. Finally, they add the functionality in, checking a session variable, to ensure that the user has inputted the text from the image correctly.

Yesterday way my first anniversary with eZ systems. Exactly 1 year and 1 day ago I signed my contract and started working for our German eZ branch. While being first employed as a freelancer (for my own wish) I soon started to work exclusively for eZ, when I came to the eZ components project at the end of July last year. Sure, I'm also doing some stuff beside (or better: in cooperation with) my work at eZ systems, but the company has evolved to my absolute primary employer.

On August 2nd 2006 we officially announced the development of a new enterprise PHP 5 library, the eZ components. We took more then 3 weeks of full time work of 5 people to get the basis of eZ components designed, before I returned from Norway to Germany again and started developing and documenting, until the first beta of eZ components came to light on November 28th. I never worked on a real company product before (only for custom inter-/intranet solutions) and bringing out a first beta was absolutely exciting. The coolest thing I felt about my job was, that I got payed for what I did as one of my greatest hobbies before. Yeah! That was (and still is) what I always wanted!

Finally, on the 30th of January, we released the first stable version of eZ components and I really had the feeling that we were on a very good way to make a great piece of software. Indeed, so far I did not loose the feeling, but it got only stronger and stronger. I remember having the birthday cake, Kore and me made these days, as if it was yesterday. Now that it's going to be 1.1 final in a few weeks, I feel that I have to thank a lot of people at eZ systems for my time so far.

Thanks to Sandro for telling me I should apply for eZ systems, when moving to Dortmund. Thanks to Ralf for accepting my application. Thanks to Kore and Tobias for so many great times. Thanks to Aleksander and Bard for supporting my personal evolution. Thanks to Amos, Derick, Fred and Ray for really good teamwork and lots of constructive discussions. Also special thanks to Derick for correcting my English over and over, guiding me through Skien and for Nasi! Thanks to Terje and Nina for bringing me to the phpDay in Bari. And finally thanks to Peter, Kristian and all the others for some great party and lots and lots of fun!

All you people at eZ systems: Stay as you are and keep up all the greatnesses! I really enjoy working with you and I hope that this relationship will go on for a long long time...

Sometimes, just the idea of starting off a new project makes developers shy away from an idea. They think about everything they have to set up even before they get to the real work. Thankfully, there are solutions out there to help you get down to the real work real fast. For example, the ATK Code Generator, an application designed to simplify creation of an application to a few clicks. This new tutorial from Jorge Garifuna shows you how.

He mentions specifically a three-step method to create an "application" around a database table. The user views the tables in the software, customizes the options for it, and clicks to have the ATK Code Generator build it out for them.

Also included in the post are links to the project's homepage, some documentation, and screenshots of the application at work.

Whether you're just getting started with PHP development or are wanting to branch out to a LAMP-based architecture (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP), making the jump from a Windows environment can be a bit difficult. Thankfully, there are tools like WAMP to help make the transition a bit smoother. It provides the same Windows-type interfaces you're familiar with, but is powered by the same technology you'll see on a LAMP install.

In this new tutorial, Bhaskar Karambelkar will walk you through the installation, configuration, and enabling of the server software.

Each step of the way includes descriptions and screenshots to help make the points even clearer, and, thanks also to the well-developed package, you'll be up and running in no time.

In a previous post crynobone shared a method for creating RSS feeds from the information stored in a database. He's back this time to handle just the opposite - gathering the data from multiple RSS feeds into a simple aggregator.

As mentioned, the entire setup revolves around the MagpieRSS library, making it a simple task to pull in and work with the contents of remote RSS files. He even shows how to use a simple Ajax connection to request the latest updates you've fetched and stored in the database.