A new tutorial on PHPBuilder.com gives a quick look at creating a form combining HTML and PHP that can send out emails to the address of choice.

Like any email form, the original form itself is quite simple. No great shakes here, just a standard HTML form with a POST method and the action pointing to the PHP page that will process the form results.

Included in the short tutorial are the HTML for the form, the PHP to process the email information from the form and the code to send it all out.

It's also important to note that they defined the email address to send it to in the PHP code handling the POST request. If you allow your user to define the email address, you're begging for spammers to come around and abuse it.

Tim Koschuetzki has a new tutorial posted today for CakePHP users out there - it's a method for transforming HTML content into Textile markup via the TextileHelper CakePHP helper.

For a current project of mine I had to find a way to decode html into textile markup. Why? Because we are using tinyMCE to process our textareas as wyciwyg editors, which generate HTML. However, we want all output controlled via textile to allow only the textile tags. Yes, we could do it with strip_tags(), but textile is much more elegant. Plus, it was a requirement by the client. Come on and find out how to detextile html.

Code is included to work on the transformation: detextile, processTag, detextile_process_glyphs and detextile_process_lists. An example is included as well, showing how to input a block of HTML content to be "textile-ized". The full code is available for cutting and pasting at the bottom of the post.

Stefan Mischook has updated his "Object Oriented PHP for Beginners" tutorial with more new steps bringing the count up to 11 of the 20 planned steps.

Based on an article I wrote for a web design magazine; the tutorial is presented as a series of simple steps where I walk the reader through the process of building objects while at the same time, exposing them to basic object oriented concepts.

Eventually, he will be producing videos similar to these for all of the sections to help make things easier for the beginners out there.

DevShed has posted part four of their series looking at the creation of graphics in PHP using the GD functionality. They take things a step further from the previous part and show how to create more complex shapes.

They show how to create things like:

• filled images and arcs
• filled polygons
• grabbing information the incoming image (like with the getimagesize function).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part six of their tutorial creating an Ajax chat application with the help of the Zend Framework. This part of the series focuses on updating the user list for the current participants in the conversation.

Updating the user list should occur whenever the user adds a new chat message or refreshes the chat window. Since we already use the MessageAction() method on our PHP IndexController class to forward such responses to the browser, we'll simply amend it to also return a list of currently online users.

They work through the code updates to make it happen - changes to the MessageAction in the IndexController that include the addition of a few new methods.

DevShed continues their series looking at the use of the graphics functionality in PHP, GD, with part three - a focus on more of the associated functions.

In this third article of the series I'll show you how to take advantage of a few more handy functions integrated with this library. These function will help you perform some basic drawing operations on a specified image stream.

They look at five new functions: imagearc, imagechar/imagecharup and imageellipse/imagefilledellipse with code examples for each.

A new introductory tutorial over on DevArticles looks to help you get acquainted with Ajax through its use in both PHP and JSP:

This is a two-part article. In these two parts I'll try to describe what AJAX is, and how to use AJAX in PHP and JSP. Later we will use some advanced JSP tag libraries to make cool AJAX-based web applications.

This first part looks at the basics of the connection - the XMLHttpRequest object and a simple example putting it to use grabbing the latest date from a background PHP or JSP script (complete with screenshots of the end result).

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted today with a look at the easy creation of dynamic XML with the data from a database.

In this article I will show how to generate dynamic XML documents with Object-Oriented PHP. Before I get started, let's get right to the heart of this functionality. Although the code may look fancy, being packaged up inside objects and inheritance, the key elements of this functionality rest in the the mysql_list_fields() and mysql_num_fields() functions.

The XML is built manually with the tags assigned to a string as they are built. The information is from a simple query to select all from a user-defined table and is output with a UTF-8 character encoding. They also include a Javascript (download) that helps in making an XMLHttpRequest connection to fetch the XML you've created and pull it in.

DevShed continues its look at using the GD graphics library in PHP with the second part of the tutorial series, this time focusing on the creation of images from existing images (and their streams).

As I stated at the end of the previous article of this series, the GD extension comes packaged with many other useful functions, which indeed deserve a close and detailed look. Thus, in this second tutorial I'll show you how to create different types of image streams from existing graphics, but in this case limiting the process to building GIF, JPG and PNG images.

They work through each of the types (GIF, JPG and PNG) creating an new one from a previous "clouds" image of the same type (a GIF out of a GIF, a JPG from a JPG, etc).

The Bakery has six new articles/tutorials they've added to their long list today including topics like ecache, working with behaviors and using Eclipse with CakePHP. Here's the list:

• ecache - easy per user or per anything cache of html or arrays
• WikkaCake: Using CakePHP as an Embedded Framework
• Image Toolbox Wrapper
• Methods for turn on/ turn off specific behaviors
• Setting up Eclipse to work with Cake
• Automatic JavaScript and CSS Packer

Be sure to check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP related content.

In a new article today, DevShed takes a closer look at the most popular graphics library for PHP - GD:

The GD library comes bundled with both PHP 4 and PHP 5. While it is a popular library that has been around for a while, many web developers do not take full advantage of its capabilities. In this five-part series, we will take a close look at what the GB library can do for you, especially in the area of dynamically-generated graphics.

This first in the five part series introduces the library showing how to make images from scratch in two ways - the more "normal" method and an alternate method using streams (which they use to create a dynanmic GIF image).

From Justin Laing over at Merchant OS there's a new tutorial on creating a simple link scraper with the help of PHP and the cURL extension.

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a PHP script that scrapes links from any web page. You learn how to use cURL, call PHP DOM functions, use XPath and store the links in MySQL.

You'll have to have PHP5 and the cURL extension enabled on your web server to make it all work, but the code is all there ready for you to cut and paste. The application grabs the page with cURL (including the possibility to fake your user agent), parses through the HTML with the DOM and XPath functionality to grab the links and uses the MySQL methods to store them into your database.

DevShed has a new article posted today - a tutorial walking you through a sort of brief history of SOAP support in PHP and some working examples of each - NuSOAP, PEAR::SOAP and PHP's SOAP extension.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) provides a flexible communication layer between applications, regardless of platform and location. As long as both the server and the client speak SOAP, they can communicate. A PHP-based web application can ask a Java database application to get some information. In this article we will try to focus on different methods of developing SOAP web service clients in PHP.

They start with a look at NuSOAP and the creation of both a client and server (as well as an example on how to use some of its debugging. Next up is PEAR::SOAP, a powerful package that simplifies much of the same functionality NuSOAP has to offer. Finally, they get to the most recent SOAP functionality for PHP, the PHP SOAP extension that comes loaded with PHP5 installations by default. This includes a brief overview of its API and code examples that, in a few lines, do what takes the others twice as much.

From the PHP-Learn-It.com website, there's a quick tutorial on how to create a bit of edit in place functionality with some simple Javascript and PHP.

Suppose we have an article page on our site where people can edit articles. The article has an edit and save button which allows the user to edit the article and save the changes as necessary. View the ajax_edit_in_place demo to see what I'm talking about.

They've gone with Prototype to handle the AJAX connection and provide both the Javascript and PHP code for editing, saving and canceling an edit on the page's content.

DevShed finished up their series on creating a search engine for MySQL with PHP in this latest article, finishing off the application with its HTML frontend.

In the previous article I showed you how to spawn the results returned by a specific search query across different web pages, so in this last part of the series I'm going to complete this search application by fixing a concrete issue associated specifically with paginating MySQL data sets.

They review the code they've created so far for the search engine and push on with the creation of a web page generation class to handle the output of the paginated results.

On the SitePoint PHP blog, there's a new post from Paul Annesley about his latest creation - a nine line unit tester for PHP, pTest.

I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn't have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. [...] I didn't need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick.

He includes the code (of course) and an example of it in action, three tests with their assertions. It's a simple little tool made of a simple purpose, a starting place for developers just learning unit testing to learn from.

In this new entry to his blog today, Chris Cassell shows how to create "magic methods" - ones that make use of overloading to do special things.

I've learned a lot of things from various open source frameworks, especially CakePHP. One of the most impressive things about Cake, and Ruby on Rails for that matter, is its magic methods in its data model class [...] I've implemented similar methods in the home-grown framework that I use at work. Here's how to do it.

In his example, he gives both the PHP4 and PHP5 code to make a simple magic method class with a __call() function to handle undefined method calls. Using this, he maps a undefined method call to another method in the class (called findAllByColor and mapped to findAll with the right parameters).

Rob Allen has posted about more updates that have been made to his Zend Framework tutorial zip file - one now contains a copy of the framework, the other doesn't.

This time, I've created two files: one with the Zend Framework (1.0.1) included and one without. The one without is much smaller at only 9KB, where as with the Framework, the zip is 2.2MB.

You can download the version with just the tutorial or with the combination directly from his websites. The tutorial has also been bumped up a version (to 1.4.4) with a few updates.

PHPBuilder.com has posted part four of their tutorial series looking at the powerful combination of Ajax and PHP. This time they focus on the integration of forms and Javascript to make more powerful, interactive input methods.

AJAX is a very powerful system which enables dynamic, constantly changing content on a page--without refreshing the page. This useful system does, however, have some limitations with current browsers. We will cover these limitations in this article, specifically those pertaining to how HTML Forms operate within AJAX dynamic content and what type of JavaScript can be used in AJAX-generated content.

They talk about the limitations HTML forms have and how to combat them with a little bit of Javascript through the creation of a simple script to pull data from a backend script into a div on the local page.

Following along with the official guide from Facebook about creating a simple application for the site, Dave Courtney ran into some issues. Specifically, a fatal error when he tried to run his three line script.

After setting up my application settings, which were all straight forward, I set about creating a simple 'Hello World' page. Following the step by step guide to creating an application provided by FaceBook I wrote a simple index.php page. [...] This is where I encountered probably the only major issue of the day.

In the end, his issue was caused by the SimpleXML he had installed locally. Once his application was uploaded, it worked just fine. With this problem down, he moved on to working with the Facebook Markup Language and how he integrated it with the database.

Learn how to use class diagrams.

This tutorial will attempt to teach you what bits are, how binary arithmetic works, what bitwise operators are and how they work.

Ready to start building extensible applications?

As you may know, clean URLs can be made with Apache's mod_rewrite, but you are able to make clean URLs with PHP only. Learn how in this tutorial

Allow your members to send each other PMs like those in major forums and bulletin boards!

Have a list of movies or music? Want them sorted alphabetically, and have them grouped by the first letter?

In this tutorial you will learn some basics for inserting data into and retrieving data from a database.

BBcodes is an excellent way of allowing your users to format their text without allowing them to use HTML. Learn how to make a parser class in this tutorial.

Learn how to program in OOP.

Using RSS feeds is a commonly used way of distributing your news headlines to the world. This tutorial will show how to make it "automatically".