Daniel Krook has a quick note on his blog today about the posting of a public draft IBM has posted of the Redbook he's been working on.

IBM has provided a public draft of the Redbook I wrote with a team of specialists in San Jose earlier this year. The book is undergoing a final editorial process to fix grammar, spelling and layout issues and to incorporate input from technical reviewers.

Please give it a read and pass your comments on to the editors via the feedback link on that page.

The draft includes infromation on developing real-world applications with PHP and DB2/Informix IDS/Cloudscape with various database interfaces (including PDO and ibm_db2). It also has installation instructions for setting up the IBM data servers with Apache and the Zend Core/Studio software.

In a follow-up to their previous article on Smarty integration with the Zend Framework, the Zend Developer Zone has posted this new item to act as an update.

I want to address some of the issues in the comments of the first part and add some further information on how to setup your application to use the Travello_View_Smarty class. Along the way you learn how to integrate classes of the ezComponents.

He uses the configuration class from the eZ Components framework to configure the application, and an __autoload to get it working. There's a bit on how to set up the configuration with the library, and how to use that config to remove the Smarty integration's dependence on the data being passed directly to the view. Now it can be defined dynamically and pulled in via the constructor they've created.

eZ publish 3.8.0beta2 is released. The package contains some new features, improvements and bug-fixes. eZ publish 3.8.0rc1 is expected on the 25th of April

Craig Freshwater, explains how in this new blog entry, PHP can be used to template your site with a few quick and easy steps.

PHP can be very useful in your website design, I use PHP for my websites difficult functions such as forums, blogs, chat, user forms, and shopping cart interface. But did you know you can use simple PHP for your website navigation systems?

The use of PHP for your websites header, left side navigation, and bottom of page information can be a great asset. Now I know what you are thinking, PHP can be complicated and intimidating to many of you, but first let me explain.

He tells it more from an "outsider's perspective", for someone not really familiar with PHP. There's a lot of introductory explaination and installation instructions on getting PHP working, but he does eventually get to the (very) simple templating example.

One of the more powerful and handy features that PHP offers is output buffering. It allows you more control over when the client's browser gets the information instead of just spewing information at random. It is a little tricky to get the hang of, so PHPit.net has put together this new tutorial on how to get started.

I'm sure most of us have come across the dreaded "Cannot modify header information - headers already sent", and this is usually caused when your script tries to send a header or set a cookie, when it's already sent output. The easiest fix is to make sure no output has been sent, but it's also possible to enable something called output buffering which also solves the problem.

In this article I'll first show you how output buffering works, and take you through most of its basic functions. After that we'll have a look at what's possible with output buffering, and show you some neat tricks.

The groundwork is laid first, giving a simple "Hello world" example to show how the code flows. They show how the buffering system works and how to use a callback function to modify the contents of the buffer before outputting (including a full replace function to text within the buffer from an array). They follow that with a look at creating your own HTML tags and using the gzip compression functionality to speed up your pages.

PEAR, the large repository of useful PHP libraries, is steadily growing even more in popularity. The PEAR server packages introduced have made it even easier for people to share their own libraries with the world. Unfortunately, all of this useful code doesn't come without a few issues, and in this new blog post, Lukas Smith mentions the top five packages with the most number of bug reports.

The 5 packages with the most bug reports are all pretty popular although the quality of the code varies. They are all also fairly complex and/or large. I have gone through the bugs of most of them now and then to see if I spot an obvious bogus report.

As of the time of this post, the top five are:

• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• SOAP
• HTML_QuickForm
• Mail_Mime
• PhpDocumentor

Lukas also puts out a call for help, hoping that there are users out there that would like to help conquer these bugs, to help out with making the packages a cleaner place. All it takes is a little time, some inititave, and a glance at the bug reports for the packages to get started.

Xavier suggested that it should also be possible to use custom templates when displaying newly created object for editing (i.e. embedded into the other object that's currently being edited) and so there's now a content/view/eoradd.tpl that you can override. The default one does exactly the same as before, so most people won't notice any difference ;)

As I had mentioned here I have been thinking about enabling custom designs for the edit part of enhancedobjectrelation. I now added two more selection modes that use a new node/view/enhancedobjectrelation.tpl view (which by default simply redirects to line view) providing for easy overriding for other classes. As a proof of concept, I added an override for the image class. It's definitely much friendlier to actually SEE what image one just selected ;)

Since my recent move to the Mac running OS X I have learnt some new stuff about PHP and Apache the hard way. OS X is shipped with Apache and PHP by default and if you compile Apache and PHP like you normally do under Linux you quickly get surprised. When I compile Apache I always use a prefix so I have it installed under /usr/local/apache or something like that. I like to have it installed like this so I can quickly change between Apache and PHP versions and configurations. Under OS X you quickly notice that Apache is not completely installed in the directory you added as prefix. The reason for that is that Apache has a different installation layout under OS X. So, you simply have to use the configure parameter --with-layout to make things work like you are used to.

The compilation switches I use are:

cd apache_1.3.34
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache \
                    --enable-module=so \
                    --enable-module=rewrite \
                    --with-layout=Apache
make
sudo make install
cd ..
cd php-4.4.2
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache  \
            --enable-mbstring \
            --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs \
            --enable-cli \
            --enable-exif \
            --with-mysql \
            --with-mbstring
make
sudo make install 

Since Kristof Coomans doesn't seem to care to blog about the cool stuff keeps on coding, I'll do it today as this time he managed to do something close to the holy grail in eZPublish hacking: attribute level edit permissions In my limited testing just a few minutes ago, this worked perfectly and solves a long standing problem in ez. Respect and thanks a lot for this!