Will Hall Online

A new tutorial has been posted to the Zend Developer Zone today looking at making scalable vector graphics with PHP and the hep of one of two charting packages - ezcGraph or SVGGraph (examples are provided for both).

Programmatically generating graphs and charts using SVG requires a deep understanding of the SVG specification and the various SVG primitives, as well as a fair amount of time for research, experimentation and debugging. Or, in other words, that's your entire weekend shot! Fortunately, help is at hand. There are a number of open-source PHP libraries that support SVG chart generation, and using them can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in adding this feature to a Web application.

He shows how to create simple images like bar, line and pie charts as well as adding in other things like a legend, custom titles and a sample where the user can define the sizes of a pie chart via some form input fields. Screenshots are included for all code examples to give you a better idea of the end result.

On the php|architect site there's a recent post that splits apart the singletons versus static methods debate that seems to com up every once and a while with a better suggestion - dependency injection.

Much more important than performance is the fact that both static methods and singletons suffer from major drawbacks. When it comes to deciding between the two, you might forgo the benchmark comparison and choose the third-party candidate: dependency injection.

He mentions the "dark side" of both static methods and singletons and how dependency injection can help rid your code of both. Instead of focusing just on the benchmark numbers, DI helps you keep your code more well-structured and "smarter" by scoping things to where they need to be and making them easier to test.

On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

This week's DZone Refcard is about Getting Started with the Zend Framework. The card introduces you to the basics of the Zend Framework and sets you on the path to creating your first project. I met the author, Jason Gilmore, to find out more about the topic.

They talk about some of what the framework currently has to offer developers, what kind of involvement he's had with it, who it supports as far as advanced PHP features and what's to come in version 2.0. The Zend Framework RefCard mentioned can be viewed or downloaded here - a six-page quick reference for some of the more common Zend Framework tasks.

Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

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Latest PECL Releases:

• WinCache 1.1.0
• timezonedb 2010.5

Just a note to all kindly Drupalists and your followers. I'll be appearing at SxSw interactive to talk about Drupal in the Cloud, sporting an updated presentation which includes info on how we're using BZR to create a "cloud platform", where all that's going anyway, plus details about our forthcoming Mercury on-demand service.

I am looking forward to seeing all sorts of great folks in/around the conference. If you're going to be in Austin this coming weekend, drop me a comment and let's coordinate! You can mark the session on your planner right here.

For those unable to attend, there will be some video and other media, and my slides will be posted online as always. See you in the Lone Star state!

During my last session on Drupalcamp in Barcelona I got the impression that there was a need for an updated guide on how to easily setup your own Apache Solr instance.
If you want to see why you or your company would have the need for an improved search experience you can still see my presentation on slideshare : http://www.slideshare.net/nickvh/drupal-apachesolrRead more

Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.

Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.

Ideal candidates should:

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....with the release of m.stubru.be the mobile site of the nr.1 public broadcast radio station "Studio Brussel".

Studio Brussel, the nr. 1 radio station of the Belgian public broadcaster VRT has released last week it's mobile website using Siruna technology.

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Alvaro Videla has submitted a new post he's written up combining PHP and Erlang yet again, but this time he's using it to just store key/value pairs rather than for session data.

In this post I want to show you some of the neat things that can be done with the PHP-Erlang Bridge extension: A Key Value Store. Erlang comes packed with a Key Value store in the form of the ETS module. This is database is pretty fast and efficient for storing the Erlang terms in memory.

He tried a proof of concept to see how well the system would respond and was able to push over 150k items into the storage in one second. Sample code and instructions on getting the bridge working are included in the post.

On the Template Monster blog there's a recent post looking at some of the upcoming features in WordPress 3.0 that many WordPress site owners have eagerly been waiting for.

Alright bloggers, web surfers and simple web enthusiasts, we've got some fascinating news for you all. Yes, Internet community can't stop buzzing about the forthcoming release of the new version of #1 blogging software '" WordPress 3.0. [...] The official release is scheduled for May 2010 but now we have opportunity to mark the major advantages that this release will bring.

They list a few of the major enhancements that'll happen in the new release including:

• a built-in multi-user option
• custom post types
• a new default design/theme
• and changes related to security concerns

You can find out more about this upcoming release from this post to the man WordPress blog.

At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

• Locale module in Drupal 6
• Properly the t() function
• i18nSync module included within i18n
• Amnesty Report Site
• Amnesty International site

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Matt Butcher has a new post to his blog today with five things that every PHP developer should know about MongoDB, the popular NoSQL database project.

2010 is the year of the document database. While momentum has been steadily building over the last seven years or so, there are now a wide variety of stable document databases -- from cloud-based ones from Amazon and Google, to a wide variety of Open Source tools, most notably CouchDB and MongoDB. So what is MongoDB? Here are five things every PHP developer should know about it.

He points out a few things - that MongoDB is a stand-alone server, that it's schemaless, you won't need to learn another query language to use it and that PHP and MongoDB play very well together (thanks to the Mongo PECL package already released).

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post (technically a repost) of an article from Kevin Schroeder about using the job queue in the Zend Server software to enhance the functionality of your application.

When talking about building a scalable application there is a big concept out there that many PHP developers are not overly familiar with. That concept is queuing. It is becoming much more prevalent in PHP-land but the concept of a queue is still relatively unused among PHP developers. [...] Queuing a job is actually very easy to do. A job is run by calling a URL where that job resides. The Job Queue daemon will receive the request from your application and will then call the URL that you specified in the API call. Once you call that URL your application can continue going on its merry way to finish serving up the request.

He includes some code snippets showing how to create the request - in this case a simple call that will just email when the job is preformed. There's more than one way to do it and he includes a more well structured/less scripty way to do things in an abstract class.

One requirement of the Archdiocese of St. Louis' website is that group administrators are able to publish and unpublish the content inside their groups, and they should also be able to schedule posts for automated publishing and unpublishing at a later time.

To do this, I used the following modules:

• OG User Roles
• Scheduler
• Publish Content
• [EDIT: I'm now using the Override Node Options module rather than Publish Content - it gives more fine-grained control over visibility of node form options.]

After enabling these modules, I spent a while in the Permissions page, and also created a new user role, "administer nodes." Ironically, I didn't assign the 'administer nodes' permission to this role, because doing so causes a huge mess ('administer nodes' gives waaay too much power to anyone except the site admin—it's best to leave that beast unchecked in most cases).

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Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with links to a few good PHP-based CodePlex projects that he thinks look pretty useful for the development community out there.

Admittedly, I'm interested in some of these projects [tagged with PHP] purely out of curiosity, but some of them actually look useful. I won't claim that these are the best of the PHP projects on Codeplex (hence the question mark in the title), but here are some that piqued my interest and that I plan to check out.

The projects in his list are include PHP LINQ classes, Virtual Earth integration and the Zend Framework DB adapter for Microsoft SQL Native Client.

Recently, I have been working with quite a few Drupal sites, and one of my favorite tools to use has become drush. For those of you who are not aware of it, drush is a command line utility (drush = DRUpal SHell) that makes management of a Drupal site much more bearable. Drush is a great tool to use and is quite simple to install on your system when you have admin rights to the box. However, what about those of us on shared hosting system?

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Over the last year, Mediacurrent has been intensively collaborating with Ad Giants, an innovative marketing company based in Dallas, Texas. Ad Giants boasts an impressive list of clients and strategic partners like T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil and business man, who has been featured on national television ads advocating an energy plan overhaul.

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