Spam is a constant burden for anyone on the web, be it through email or via something like comments on a website. The NETTUTS site can't help so much with the first one, but they've come up with a new tutorial that can help with the second with a few methods.

Deciding on the best method of spam prevention on your blogs, forums, or even contact forms can be difficult. In this article we will take a look at a service called Akismet and how it can help. We will also look at why some other methods of fighting spam fail.

They give a few ways to waylay the spammers including:

• Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions
• Keyword Blacklist
• CAPTCHA
• and a service called Akismet

They go into a bit more detail on this last one, even going so far as to included code ( 2008-10-06 22:40:03 | 全文 | 评论(0)

Using the Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework Jani Hartikainen has created a simple way to make a PDF generator class that uses templates and content arrays/XML to create the new files.

There are some expensive libraries that you can use to generate PDF files...but why bother with them, when there are good free alternatives like Zend_Pdf? [...] Since this is a quite repetitive task, let's also create a PDF generator class to help us. In case you don't have Zend_Pdf, just download Zend Framework to get it.

He shows how to set it up to work with basic PHP arrays to pull the content from as well as an XML structure with the same sort of information. You can download his class here.

It's been a week since we "rebooted" the php|architect brand—time for some thoughts, lessons learned and selected statistics.

First of all, the reason why we did this. Many people have written me personally wondering what madness possessed me to authorize a price drop of over 50%, and moving to a colour-only, print & PDF format—some actually questioning my motives, as if the changes were really the result of an alliance with some sinister external corporate force that is silently taking over our company.

Reality is always much duller than fiction
From a certain point of view, during a period of questionable, government-sponsored bailouts that appear to reward incompetence and crime, I can see how people would welcome the news with suspicion. After all, when a box of pasta has doubled in price over th ......

In this new post Jeremy Johnstone looks at creating a class to add that's missing from the basic datatype set of the language - enums.

I stumbled across a blog post on how to implement Enums in PHP via userland code written by Jonathan Hohle. I liked the concept he had, but the implementation was a bit unappealing because it used eval() among other more minor issues. You shouldn't need to generate Enums at runtime, so I took that as a challenge to find a way to do it at compile time, thus making the code much more efficient.

His enums would support type hinting and would, ideally, be iterable. He gives the code he's worked up - a base class, another than extends it to make a basic enum structure and some handy changes to support comparisons. A few more change ......

I get this question a lot - “How do I change the background color of a single cell in a treeview?”
If you look around you’ll see a couple of ways of doing this using display callbacks and other highly processor and memory intensive methods - but there’s a much simpler way.
Let’s start at the beginning. [...]

Latest PEAR Releases:

• Console_CommandLine 1.0.3
  
• Services_Trackback 0.6.2
  
• Crypt_CBC 1.0.0
  
• Services_Atlassian_Crowd 0.9.3
  
• Net_Vpopmaild 0.3.2
  

This is pretty old news dating back to this spring, but the Danish IT and Telecommunications board (IT- og Telsestyrelsen) has published an experimental REST interface OIOREST for public data such as regions, municipalities, post codes, schools, streets, and addresses. And example of a query identifying a street: http://oiorest.dk/danmark/veje?q=frankrigsgade.OIOREST is a great initiative, and we hope it will be expanded to other datasources. There is one big concern though — it is not employing established data standards but instead using its own custom XML schemas.
What they should really consider is publishing the data as RDF in the Linked Data manner. That would make Denmark one of the pioneers not only in REST adoption, but also in the Semantic Web.

Tickets are now on sale for PHPNW - the PHP Conference in Manchester, UK, on November 22nd. This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets are priced at a very reasonable and credit-crunch-friendly £50 (with discounts for students and OAPs) - and all that isn't enough to persuade you, remember I'll be there on the day too :)