The PHP Grind

Job Posting: Insource Group Seeks Contract-to-Hire PHP Developer (Dallas, TX)

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Wez Furlong’s Blog: Identity/Authentication and PHP OpenSSL updates in the pipeline

In his latest post, Wez Furlong shares some of the updates he’s made to his blog - specifically when it comes to the external user authentication system he’s implemented.

Why do I have an external authentication mechanism? I don’t want to maintain a user database just for my blog. It’s more moving parts and requires things like sending email pings to random email addresses and mechanisms for resetting or retrieving a forgotten password. Not to mention that it’s yet another username/password to be remembered by the person doing the commenting.

So, instead, he authenticates against the php.net cvs setup for any and all users of his site. He transitions from this over to the main point of the post - his thoughts on authentication, specifically the move towards a more centralized resource to bounce the user’s information off of. He mentions TypeKey and OpenID as two technologies that are moving in the right direction.

Bringing it back to PHP, Wez notes that the PHP support for both of these technologies is very lacking, but he’s been working on a patch for the openssl extension that could help that significantly.

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Zend Developer Zone: Marco Tabini Talks About php|tek

Cal Evans managed to sit down and talk with Marco Tabini of php|architect magazine for a few minutes to talk about their upcoming conference, php|tek - specifically the theme, “PHP::innovate()”.

Last week, Marco Tabini, publisher of php|architect and all around nice guy, posted the “Call For Papers” for php|tek 2007. […] Since I couldn’t find my “marketing speak to English” dictionary, I decided to call Marco and see if he could translate it for me manually.

Cal asks him what the theme means and what it means to those proposing sessions and for those that will be making the trip to Chicago this year in May. Marco’s answers cover the two-layer intention behind the theme and the flexibility that it brings. They have their ideas on what it suggests, but it could just as well mean many things to many different people. The intent is to represent how PHP has evolved and that it’s really become a mature, innovative language to work with.

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Unit Testing in Detail

Last week we introduced you to setting up a unit testing framework. This week you will learn about running multiple tests simultaneously creating more informative error messages and more. This article the second of three parts is excerpted from chapter 6 of the book em Advanced PHP Programming em written by George Schlossnagle Sams ISBN 672325616 ….

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The Shadow Fox Network: Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP Functions

On the Shadow Fox Network, there’s a new tutorial that shows how to combine the Apache mod_rewrite functionality with some PHP functions to make passing variables over your rewritten URL easy.

You can’t pass variables well without adding more commands to mod_rewrite. So here you’ll learn to add unlimited parameters to your links with only one simple PHP function.

He starts with a mini-refresher course on the contents of the previous article and moves to the simple rewrite example that makes it possible - a two line statement. Then, it’s on to the PHP - again, a simple function that does things simply, grabs all of the parameters from the URL and splits them out into a global parameters array. He even includes a simple example as a tutorial you can try out with the demo.

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