Version 1.4.1 of the Prologue WordPress theme is now available. Here’s the list of changes since the 1.3 release:

• Fix CSS for lists (Matt Thomas)

• Show login message when comments are disabled instead of comment form (Sam Bauers)

• Don’t float the avatar out for the authors widget

• Rename get_avatar( ) to prologue_get_avatar( )

• Use make_clickable( ) in posts, makes URLs mentioned clickable. (Michael Adams, Barry Abrahamson)

• Provide edit link for comments (Mark Riley)

• Add theme tag: microblog (Lloyd Budd)

• Respect time settings instead of hard coding them (Lloyd Budd)

• iPhone style sheet (Matt Mullenweg)

Source: Joseph Scott's blog.

David Walsh post an article in which he show how to get your FeedBurner reader tatistic using PHP cURL and the FeedBurner API. He writes:

«My favorite part of the Web 2.0 revolution is the abundance of APIs. Everyone has one: Digg, Feedburner, Pownce, Flickr, Google Maps, etc. FeedBurner provides a sweet "Awareness API" that allows you to pull statistics from your FeedBurner account. Here's how you do it using PHP cURL.»

You can read full version of this article with examples in the David Walsh blog.

Michael Mahemoff post an article in which he tells about handling the URL parameters variables in PHP language. He writes:

«I've recently been playing around with PHP again, because (a) it's vastly simpler to deploy personal projects in PHP than any other platform (aside from pure client-side Ajax of course!) (b) it's so easy to get simple stuff done.

Anyway, one thing I'm doing is creating a RESTful service where parameter crunching is at an all-time high. The ancient way this was done was with magically created globals. i.e. For the URL http://example.com?id=10, you would end up with a global called $id, set to 10. But the more contemporary way to do it is to use a global array called $GET, i.e. $GET[$id]. This is considered safer, to ensure malicious users don't set important globals. And in PHP 6.0, the former way is being obliterated altogether, since the relevant configuration option - register_globals is being altogether removed.»

Source: Sofware As She's Developed.

New version of WordPress blog engine released. Here's excerpt from official release info:

«I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.»

You can read more at WordPress site.

There is an intresting tutorial about creating WordPress themes from scratch posted on the ThemeTation site. Here's hort table of contents of this article:

• Structuring, Designing in Photoshop.

• Slicing and Coding.

• WordPress Implementation.

Source: ThemeTation.

Christian Budshedl post an intresting article about using WordPress Custom fields. Here's small excerpt from this article:

«WordPress gives an author the ability to add extra data to each written post and page. This data is called meta-data and is stored in custom fields.

These fields are really flexible in use and make it possible for developers and theme-authors to create stunning sites, far beyond from normal blog design.

Vicram Vaswani tells about integrating PHP applications with Google Calendar. This tutorial covers the following topics:

• Introduction

• Understanding the Calendar Data API

• Retrieving event listings with SimpleXML

• Adding new events

• Deleting and modifying existing events

• Integrating calendar operations

• Searching for events

• Summary

You can read full version of this tutorial on the IBM developerWorks site.

There is an intresting article about fixing the problems with images upload in WordPress. Here's the small excerpt from this article:

«I bet most of you have alraedy upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1. Are there any errors or bugs you found when using it? Most of the time, I am using FTP for photo uploading. Today, one of my theme users told me about the problem in uploading photo using wp-admin. Then, I just realized, I forgot about the bug when I release the theme. I should also include a note for the users. So, here is a way to solve it.»

You can read more on the ThemeTation site.

Ken Bluffman post an article about working with graphiiic using the PHP language. This tutorial steps through using the GD library, showing you how to create and alter images on Web pages. It starts with the basic GD construct, then builds on it to showcase various graphics techniques.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

Source: IBM developerWorks.

Symphony 1.1 released with following changes and enhancements:

• The new architecture of symfony is more configureable and decoupled, allowing you to use or replace part of the framework very easily,

• The new object-oriented form framework makes form creation and reuse a breeze,

• The brand new task system allows to quicly make extensible batch scripts and command line utilities,

• Symfony has now a decent YAML parser, with verbose error reporting,

• The new plugin manager is now compatible with the PEAR standard API, handles plugins dependencies, and provides options for a better control on what you install,

• The formats handling system can make your app behave and respond differently whether an iPhone, a bot, or a browser is requesting it,

• The Propel 1.2 ORM is now bundled as a plugin, which means you can very easily switch to Doctrine or even to Propel 1.3 if you prefer,

• The bundled sfCompat10Plugin will ensure that your 1.0 based projects will still work after having upgraded to 1.1!

• The routing is now cached, so you can expect a significant performance boost when you got plenty of routes in your app. Also, the routing class is no more a singleton so you can now extend and reference it easily to fit your needs.

Source: Symfony Project site.

Octavia Anghel post an intrestinh article about generating repotrs and statistics with PHP. She writes:

«Statistics and reports analyze the change over time of any kind of phenomena. For example, you could evaluate an employer's performance by analyzing progress curves provided by reports; managers can make business decisions based on statistical sales data; meteorologists can predict natural disasters based on statistical weather pattern data—and the list goes on. For the software industry, statistics and reports provide both an ongoing challenge and an ongoing market. At present, programming languages such as PHP and Java come with built-in packages for developing applications around statistical problems.

This article explores PHP's support for the statistical domain. You will see how to generate reports and statistics for simple text phrases, XML documents, and complex databases. »

Source: devX.com.

Source: devX.com.

Fabien Potencier post a large article, in which he describes the upcoming Symfony 1.1 architecture. You can view the symfony classes on the following outline.

Source: Symfony.

Nathan Good Post a new tutorial about debugging PHP scripts using the Eclipse an PDT. Here's small excerpt rom annotation for this tutorial:

«This tutorial demonstrates how to configure the PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in for Eclipse to debug your PHP scripts. It also introduces the perspectives you'll use (namely, PHP Debug) when taking closer looks at your PHP scripts.

After completing this tutorial, you'll be able to set up either XDebug — an open source project that allows you to debug executable scripts and scripts running on a Web server — or the Zend Debugger in Eclipse using the PDT project to develop PHP applications. You'll understand the various parts of the PDT project's PHP Debug perspective and learn how to set up, view, and work with breakpoints. You also learn how to inspect the values of variables as you are stepping through the code, as well as how to debug PHP Web applications on your local server so you can run through your PHP Web application with the debugger.»

Source: IBM developerWorks.

Gregoire Hubert post a new tutorial about using YAML in Symphony framework. He writes:

«Here is a short tutorial about my discovery of the new YAML parsing library that comes with symfony 1.1. As you may know, YAML files are a place symfony developpers spend time writing configuration, it is very important they have a good tool to manipulate data and debug files. Giving trainings on symfony 1.0 is a part of my job and when I see people starting the configuration files, I can notice the YAML system in the first version of symfony has two major problems:

• The error messages do not help developers finding their mistakes in a YAML file.

• Converting PHP data into a YAML structure can produce messy outputs.»

Source: Symphony blog.

Gilles Maes post a large article in which he explains all aspects of WordPress comments handling. Here's the table of contents for this article:

1. The PHP backend

2. General code

3. Displaying the comments

4. The comment form

5. Some little tricks

6. Conclusion

Source: Nettuts.