Development Blog With Code Updates : Developercast.com

As the Zend Developer Zone points out, there’s a great introductory tutorial that anyone should check out if they’re looking to get into the world of programming plugins in WordPress.

Wordpress is a highly used and easily customizable platform for content creation and management. In this post I’ll guide you through the basic structure and steps required to create a simple and useful wordpress plugin.

Bruno walks through the whole process, from creating the default plugin information, adding filters to the sample code and making the hook so that the WordPress API knows how to use it.

From an announcement on the main PHP.net website today, the official call for papers for this year’s DC PHP Conference 2007 has been announced.

Join us at the 2nd Annual DC PHP Conference. Technology experts are invited to participate in the East Coast’s premiere forum for PHP’s vast number of users. Present your technical concepts, cutting edge applications, or business applications for an opportunity to showcase your ideas in the PHP community.

The abstracts for your talk need to be submitted on or before July 22nd to be considered for inclusion in the conference. Those to be included in the schedule for this year’s conference will be notified by August 15th, 2007.

The PHP-GTK website has four new posts highlighting three different widgets and a Timer class to make working with delays in applications simpler:

• CommandWidget - a terminal like widget for php-gtk
• Dial widget - a graphical widget to display an analog value
• ScrollingLabel - a funny label widget with scrolling capabilities
• Timer class : simplifying gtk::timeout_add

Keep an eye on the Code Snippets section of the PHP-GTK website for more helpful tips and tricks.

As per php|architect the XAMPP Group has released ther results of a survey for users of the package.

Included in the spotlights of the results were things like:

• Almost half of the XAMPP users would like to also have ASP.NET bundled with XAMPP
• XAMPP is popular not only in private use (91%) but also in the non-profit and educational sectors
• XAMPP users are generally pretty neutral when it comes to frameworks and add-on packages like phpBB and Wordpress being bundled with the package
• Over half would like to see PostgreSQL bundled also, not just MySQL

Tony Bibbs takes a look at an increasingly popular bit of functionality in PHP5, the SOAP extension, and notes that it still has a “ways to go”.

In my latest round of web services work in PHP5 I was creating a PHP5 client that interacts with our Java-based ERP. The client needs to be a combination of a couple of WSDL’s into one, nice, compact and powerful client. It should be noted this client will be distributed via the State of Iowa PEAR channel so it will undoubted by used by other project in our organization and throughout state government so the result needs to have a lot more fit-and-finish than would be typical.

He mentions his expectations for PHP’s usage of the protocol, including the automatic generation of variables/methods/etc to help the developer use the remote application easier.

Nick Halstead takes a look at another aspect of the Zend Framework in his latest blog post - the ACL component in the most recent release, Zend Framework RC1.

Yesterday RC1 of Zend Framework was released. I have been working away using it for several months and I have tried to give back small snippets of code as I went along. I had to do some work on my class that extends the Zend ACL and it reminded me how I like to approach coding as a whole.

He goes on to look at what the Zend Framework access control functionality is and how he plans on using it. He follows this with a few code snippets that, among other things, show how the Zend_Config_Ini component could be used to maintain the access list.

Rob Allen has a quick note today about two updates he’s made to the Zend_Config module of the Zend Framework:

• Addition of a get method to grab values from a configuration node
• Moved asArray to be deprecated in favor of toArray/

You can download the latest version of the Zend Framework from the project’s main site and, to get you started, you can also check out Rob’s great Getting Started tutorial

Carl and Richard talk with Frans Bouma, author of LLBLGen, a very popular ORM modeling and code generation tool for .NET

Andi Gutmans has a reminder for all of those wanting to get their presentations in for this year’s Zend/PHP Conference and Expo - the Call for Papers ends tomorrow, May 31st 2007.

In October, 2007 we are hosting our 3rd annual Zend/PHP Conference near San Francisco. It is a great opportunity to meet other people from the PHP community, meet with various users of ours who are building business-critical applications, get to meet some of the commercial eco-system builders and of course hear what Zend is up to.

This year’s conference is being held at the Hyatt Regency at the San Francisco Airport October 8th through the 11th. The general overview of each day of the conference has been posted already and you can register now to reserve your place!