PEAR's Translation2 package provides a sophisticated framework for adding multi-language support to a Web application. This article takes a close look at the special features of this package, with examples of using it with both MySQL and XML data sources. […]

The PEAR Services_Twitter package provides a full-featured interface for interacting with the Twitter API through a PHP application. This article looks at the various methods supported by this package, and illustrates how they can be used to integrate Twitter data into a Web application with PHP. […]

Christoph Dorn recently started to play around with Zend Server CE, and wanted to get FirePHP, a debugging tool, working on it. On his blog he takes you through his process to show you how to do this, and also gives a little history on PEAR […]

On his blog Nabeel Shahzad goes through creating a deployment using Phing, replacing nasty shell scripts; extracting from Subversion, variable replacements and file manipulation, and creating multiple deployment types in one build file. […]

Ever since the big search engines added auto-suggest, hardly a week goes by without a client asking me to build similar autocomplete functionality into a Web form. Fortunately, modern programming toolkits like Dojo provide ready-made widgets that have the necessary client-side functions for autocomplete. Add a little bit of server-side glue, in the form of a PHP script that talks to a database to generate valid suggestions, and enabling this functionality in a Web application now becomes a matter of hours, rather than days. In this article, I’ll show you how to do this using three different libraries: PEAR HTML_QuickForm, YUI, and Dojo. Come on in, and find out more! […]

Unless you've spent the past couple of years down a rabbit hole, you've already heard about AJAX: it's a technique that combines asynchronous client-server communication with a set of existing toolkits (JavaScript, CSS, the DOM) to selectively update parts of a Web page, instead of the traditional "full page reload". This produces applications that are quicker and more responsive to user input, resulting in a better user experience. But what does all this have to do with PHP, you ask? Well, PHP is commonly used on the server end of the connection, to handle AJAX requests and send back responses. But that isn't all it can do - with a little PEAR package called HTML_AJAX, you can use PHP to significantly simplify the work that goes into building and deploying an AJAX application. That's where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR HTML_AJAX class, together with a few examples of how you can use it to AJAX-ify various Web applications. Keep reading, and be prepared to be amazed! […]

W. Jason Gilmore has written an article about different ways of sending email with PHP. His article discusses the native mailer function, the PEAR Mail package, and the Zend_Mail component under a Zend Framework approach. […]

Let’s take a look at two extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it’s easier to navigate and search. […]

If you’re building a Web-based administration tool to interact with a database, there are some routine tasks that you quickly get used to coding: listing records, adding records, and updating or deleting records. Frameworks like the Zend Framework and CakePHP come with various built-in methods to help with this, and even if you’re not using one of these frameworks, there are a number of tools that can make coding these functions a breeze. […]

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP’s pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL resultsets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR. In this article, I’ll introduce you to two packages that make it surprisingly easy to hook your PHP scripts up to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and extract the data contained therein. I’ll also show you how to dynamically create a new spreadsheet from scratch, complete with formulae and formatting, and import data from a spreadsheet into a database. So come on it, and let’s get started! […]