Cal Evans has a new post to his blog today listing some of the more popular Drupal podcasts that he’s found for his wife to listen to on her way in to work.
The lovely and talented Kathy has been working with Drupal now for a year and has decided that she really likes it. Since I believe in using commute time to learn, I decided to see what I could find for her to listen to on her daily commute. I found several active Drupal podcasts and vidcasts. Here’s the list I gave to her, if you are into Drupal, give them a listen and quit wasting that morning commute waiting for the shock-jocks to actually say something funny.
The podcasts on his list include the Acquia Podcast Series, the Lullabot Drupal Podcast and the Learn By The Drop Videos.
Brian Swan has posted another in his series looking at connection options for the SQL Server driver for PHP. In his latest he looks at the “CharacterSet” setting, an easy way to define which encoding the remote database is using.
One thing that helped me understand the CharacterSet option was to realize that its name is a bit misleading (although it seems to be inline with other uses of CharacterSet or charset). It is used to specify the encoding of data that is being sent to the server, not the character set. With that in mind, the possible values for the option begin to make sense: SQLSRV_ENC_CHAR, SQLSRV_ENC_BINARY, and UTF-8.
He looks at each of these three options in more detail – SQLSRV_ENC_CHAR being the default, SQLSRV_ENC_BINARY when binary data is needed and UTF-8 when, obviously, you need UTF-8 data transfer between the client and server.
On his Test.ical.ly blog Christian Schaefer has a new post looking at how you can use Zend Framework components in a Symfony2 application.
Recently I wanted to use a part of the Zend Framework (v1) in my Symfony2 project. After struggeling with the autoloading for a while and a little help from fellow developers on Twitter I found it actually to be quite easy.
He illustrates, showing a method for pulling down the source from github, registering a prefix with Symfony2 for the Zend Framework components and how to remove a lot of the issues with notices and warnings (and fatal errors) by removing the require_onces that aren’t needed.
Ken Guest has a recent post talking about some recent updates that have been made surrounding the PEAR support for finding holiday dates in various parts of the world.
In the space of just under a month Date_Holidays_Croatia and Date_Holidays_Australia were released – many thanks to the guys who did the actual hard work to be fair as all I did was package them up and release them!
You can find more of these Date packages on the PEAR site that could help you and your application get things a bit more localized. He also reminds you that, if you’d like to help out and pick up support for some of the older, unmaintained packages, you can follow this guide and get started easily.
Several community members have written up perspectives from their experience at this year’s PHP UK Conference – both attendees and speakers alike. Here’s just a few of them so far:
If you’ve posted your own thoughts and experiences from this year’s PHP UK Conference and it’s not on our list, send it over and we’ll get it added!
PHPClasses.org has release their latest episode of their “Lately in PHP” podcast today highlighting an opinion that PHP is losing popularity to other languages like C# and Python.
[Manuel Lemos, Ernani Joppert and Rochak Chauhan] also discuss the latest developments of the TIOBE programming languages ranking. The latest numbers seem to suggest that languages like Python and C# are gaining popularity supposedly at the expense of an apparent loss of interest on PHP.
The ranking their referring to can be found here. You can listen to this new episode either through their in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. There’s also the complete transcript if you’d like a text-only version.
On the Mayflower blog today there’s a new tutorial posted about creating coding standard “sniffs” for the PHP_CodeSniffer tool. A “sniff” is what defines the rules for your coding standards to follow (like “curly braces after function definitions should be on the next line” kinds of things).
In some cases the pre-installed coding standards like PEAR or Zend might not be sufficient for our current project or we want to deviate. This is the moment when we want to be able to create a custom one that fits our special needs. In this article I want to share my first experiences with you about how to create a custom coding standard for PHP_CodeSniffer.
They get into the details of what a “sniff” is and shows where they belong in the current structure of your PEAR install. There’s an example of how to run the command line tool and how to create your own structure for your own custom sniffs. Their first example sniff checks to ensure that the first letter of a class is in uppercase.
The Ibuildings techPortal has announced a contest today where they’re giving away a free pass to this year’s Dutch PHP Conference.
I’m wildly excited to announce that we have a ticket to give away for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011!! The conference is entirely English-language (although you will hear many languages spoken in the hallways!), and takes place in Amsterdam between 19th and 21st May 2011. The schedule is online now, and it promises three days of really excellent technical content from some of the leaders of the PHP Community from Europe and beyond. The tickets are on sale already; bookmark this link in case you don’t win the ticket.
Entering the contest is simple – just leave a comment on the post with an email address and the winner will be picked from the group. You’ll have to leave a comment before March 18th, though or it won’t count towards the contest!
On the php|architect site today there’s a new tutorial from Joshua Thijssen about using RDD graphs in PHP. RDD graphs are commonly used in dashboard monitoring applications for everything from web servers to network traffic. Joshua introduces you to the topic and shows you how to use the extension in a sample script.
You may not be familiar with the term RRD graph, but if I show you one, you probably recognize them instantaneously. They are used to plot all kind of data against time in a very easy way which is why they are used a lot in all kind of applications. Even though many consider RRD as a library to create graphs, it is actually more than that: it’s a complete system to store aggregated data in a very efficient way.
He talks about how to load in the extension (or the command line, if it won’t compile) and create a sample graph or two from some database information. The functions the extension enables make it simple to create some basic graphs quickly and easily.
