Right on the tails of a new release of the Cgiapp set of libraries, Matthew O'Phinney has posted a first tutorial in a series covering its usage. In this tutorial, he looks at a creating a "template switcher" for Cgiapp2-based applications.

To make it simpler for developers to access this templating system, Matthew created the Cgiapp2_Plugin_Template_Interface, a standardized interface for the template plugins. It's this interface that he demonstrated an example of, giving only a few lines of code (all that's needed) to switch between Smarty and Savant templating systems.

In this new post on the RosSoft blog today, they have the full code for integrating the CakePHP framework with the web services that Flickr offers to make a simple searchable page.

It's actually a clone of an application shown in a screencast as done in Ruby on Rails.

They have some brief instructions for getting things set up before demonstrating the "installation script" to get it all up and running automatically (don't you wish more applications were like this?) - it asks questions along the way to ensure what the settings you want and that they are correct.

Scott Mattocks is continuing his PHP-GTK series over on php|architect's ART (article repository) with this look at enhancing the process started in part one.

You should already have the needed PHP-GTK installation performed before checking this one out - there's no installation walkthrough here. He starts off with a very simple example, an empty window, that will serve as the testbed for the rest of the tutorial. He adds on to this humble beginning with increasing functionality (explaining each step of the way) to finally echo out a "Hello PHP-GTK" inside the box.

PHPit.net brings yet another great tutorial your way with this first look at the AutoCRUD library for PHP - a database abstraction layer to help with some of the more mundane tasks (create/read/update/delete) of dealing with your data.

The tutorial provides a quick introduction to the functionality of the library - including built-in support for unique keys, table-object generation on the fly, and the benefit of being fully unit tested. Next up, the setup - there's some sample SQL to plug in to follow with the examples and the starting code to get the class included and working. They look at basic crud functionality, with a highlight on selecting, and the relationship handling abilities built-in.

Cal Evans has written up an article for php|architect's ART (article repository) covering "Zen(d) and the Art of Email", a look at the use of the Zend_Mail package from the Zend Framwork.

He talks briefly about advantages that the Zend_Mail package has over the traditional mail() and starts off with some sample code to illustrate it's abilities right off. The rest of the tutorial is used to explain this example, breaking it down chunk by chunk - all the way down to sending the closing statements to the remote mail server.

Stephan Schmidt has posted information today about a tutorial he'd previously written for the Zend website concerning his XML_Parser PEAR package he maintains, but never saw publication on Zend's site.

You can head directly over to the tutorial via this link to read up on this great package.

From WebMonkey, there's a new article for all of the bloggers out there that just don't know where to get started with the look and feel of their site. Tim Ziegler wants to help, and in "Get Your Feet Wet with WordPress" he provides everything from day one.

He covers a few different topics, including installing custom templates, how WordPress template files work together, working a bit with PHP to pull in remote content (or local, for that matter), and the best places to grab some of those handy WordPress plugins.

The one thing he doesn't cover is the installation, so you'll need to have it up and working before you tackle this tutorial. He suggests starting with a good base theme and going from there - changing settings, modifying the HTML, and using plugins to your advantage to enhance the functionality of your site.

In this week's newsletter, we bring you news about the first release candidate of eZ components 1.1 and an update on eZ publish 4.0 development. We also have news about the on-line documentation, an announcement of the stable version of the Online Editor 4.1, and news about the eZ publish 3.9 feature request list. The newsletter also includes an update on the current bug status.

On BarelyFitz Designs, there's a handy tutorial that's been posted to help developers out there combine the powers of PHP and CSS to form a sort of color management system for their site.

They follow the steps to making a CSS file with PHP - generate the header and output the CSS - as well as examples of its usage. They create a range of colors based around a central one, five levels in either direction. The file they've created to accomplish this is also available for download.