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The Zend Developer Zone has posted an interview with the two authors of one of APress’ latest releases, “The Definitive Guide to symfony” - Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier.

Frameworks are everywhere in the PHP community these days. Different frameworks fill different needs and have different personalities behind them. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier, the driving forces behind the symfony framework. Not too long ago, symfony released their 1.0 milestone version. They have also released their extensive documentation in print from Apress, as well as on the web.

The questions range from the usual “how did you get started with PHP” out to questions about the book, about the framework, and about the documentation surrounding both.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted an interview with the two authors of one of APress’ latest releases, “The Definitive Guide to symfony” - Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier.

Frameworks are everywhere in the PHP community these days. Different frameworks fill different needs and have different personalities behind them. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier, the driving forces behind the symfony framework. Not too long ago, symfony released their 1.0 milestone version. They have also released their extensive documentation in print from Apress, as well as on the web.

The questions range from the usual “how did you get started with PHP” out to questions about the book, about the framework, and about the documentation surrounding both.

On the Bakery (the CakePHP blog), there’s a new case study on how a group of developers created a “Web 2.0 dating site in 66.5 hours” (just short of 3 days worth of work).

Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating website (http://mingle2.com), from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half. Deliverables included: the idea, planning, design, development, testing, and launch.

The study is broken up into the (long list of) key steps that were followed:

• Identify an Opportunity
• Brain-dump
• Generate ideas from your competition
• Brain-dump some more
• Have a specific goal, don’t try to make the website do everything
• Keep. It. Simple. Stupid
• Minimize interference
• Avoid “feature creep”
• Web 2.0 names are going to be very tacky in a few years
• If you get stuck on something, put it on the backburner
• Prioritize features so you can give prominent real estate to those that need it
• Put a lot of work into the functional mockups
• Mix it up, keep things interesting

And finally, “The Design” where he looked at achieving balance, got a “holy crap, that’s pretty” reaction, and to make things look up to date. The end result of the labor is mingle2.com, a 100% free online dating website.

On his blog, Oscar Merida has a quick new post those just starting out with sessions should take a look at. He gives four quick tips of things to watch out for that can help your development process go smoother.

PHP’s support for sessions make adding “state” to your web application super easy. Bus because the illusion of state is maintained by storing a Session ID via a user’s cookies, you might find yourself losing potentially productive hours chasing down bizarre client side bugs or opening up a potential security hole. Here are 4 tips to help you avoid wasting your time and securing your site.

Items on the list are:

• Don’t use underscores in host names
• Commit your sessions before redirects
• Prevent session fixation (great security tip!)
• Don’t expose session_id’s

Check out the comments - there’s some good recommendations in there as well.

There’s an interesting new post over on the O’Reilly OnLamp.com website containing some statistics about their book sales for the past few years by language.

Recently there was a thread on the O’Reilly Radar started by Tim O’Reilly posting a chart that I put together from our book sales data. The chart showed comparative market share for most of the relevant programming languages. I have updated this in the chart below and have included 2005 data as well.

The chart shows the trends each of the languages’ sales has followed over the course of the past years. PHP’s on the last and seems to have held pretty steady in a time when very few seem to be trending upward.

The roScripts website has a new tutorial that anyone just starting out to create a search engine with PHP and MySQL should get their hands…er eyes on. It steps through the creation of a simple PHP-based search engine, showing multiple methods to achieve the goal.

The right search engine on your website won’t bring you more traffic but it will help your visitors to better locate things so it will keep them on your pages. A good search engine implemented can increase your hits with almost 30% and this is tested. I’m not talking just to have a tutorial.

The different methods the show how to implement include:

• using a straight LIKE on each word entered
• paring down those results using ORs on other columns too
• implementing the Porter Stemmer algorithm
• finding matches that contain the term but not only one part of it
• Full-text searches

It’s a good overview of some of the basic steps to getting your own search up and running, but some of them, when applied to sites with larger amounts of data behind them, wouldn’t be useful at all (slowness mainly).

The AnyExamples site has a new tutorial posted that looks the creation of a “multiple photo thumnail generator”.

Built-in PHP library gd does not have ready-to-use function for photo(jpeg) thumbnail generation. Although there are many such examples on the net, they are usually not suitable for effective generating series of thumbnails (240×240, 140×140, 80×80). This article provides php function thumbnail_generator and trivial image uploading script, which generates series of thumbnails.

They start with the creation of two functions, one to calculate the new thumbnail’s size and the other to work to create it. They explain it briefly then move on to a useful application - a file upload that automatically creates a thumbnail for an uploaded image.

The phpaddiction website has posted the first part of a series today covering URL routing with PHP (commonly used by frameworks to route requests through a centralized location.

Most PHP frameworks use some variation of the front controller pattern to centralize common code and logic. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I am going to ignore those for now. In fact the first part of this series will explore a simple procedural URL routing method that contains many of the disadvantages. In later articles we will build upon this basis and address the disadvantages.

He walks through the steps to get things set up - working with mod_rewrite, creating the “entry point” for your application, and finally, how to execute a command based on the request’s action.