On the DZone site there's a new tutorial showing how to set up a new PHP project inside of one of the latest versions of the NetBeans IDE using a subversion repository as the base.

This article describes my experience in creating a PHP project in NetBeans IDE 6.5 from the repository version of Mediawiki. The project included 3 kinds of data that a developer would probably want to handle differently. Fortunately, the PHP Project from Existing Sources wizard made it easy to keep these 3 kinds of data separate from each other, as you will see in the following procedure.

The tutorial works through a seven-step process showing you how to point the software at your repository and have it pull in the information and automatically set up all the things you'll need (screenshots are included).

On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki has a new post showing how to get CakePHP to play nicely with a HABTM query and pagination.

The problem is that a user inputs some search criteria into a form, the resultset exceeds 30 rows for example and the user must be able to browse through the resultset via different pages. [...] This problem itself is in fact not much of a problem. We just need to store the form conditions somewhere and then hack it together. So what we are going to do is that we raise the difficulty bar a lot more by trying to get the pagination work over a HABTM relation.

Code is included for the model and controller to get the job done.

The NETTUTS.com blog has a new screencast posted showing how to create a simple thumbnailing script you can use in any application (like an image gallery).

In this week's screencast, I'll show you how to upload files and then have PHP dynamically create a thumbnail. Whether you're building an ecommerce site, or just a simple gallery, these techniques will absolutely prove to be useful. If you're ready for your "spoonfed" screencast of the week, let's get going!

The post also includes all of the code and HTML that you'll need to get it up and running (very cut and paste-able).

PHPBuilder.com has posted a list of resources that they offer to help both beginning and experienced PHP developers to further their knowledge:

PHP is one of the most popular scripting languages used to develop applications on the web today. As a result, internet.com has a multitude of PHP resources throughout our network of websites. Here are some of our best PHP resources, along with some featured tutorials and out-of-network resources that you may not know about.

The grouping of links also include external resources like the main PHP site and Zend's website.

• Tillate Blog: Clientside Cache Control
• Community News: O'Reilly Offers PHP/SQL Certificate Series
• Zoe Slattery's Blog: Lateral Thinking
• PHPro.org: SPL Autoload
• Smashing Magazine: 10 Advanced PHP Tips to Improve Your Programming
• Site News: Job Postings for the week of 11.09.2008
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: Test Dependencies in PHPUnit 3.4
• Jani Hartikainen's Blog: Improved Zend Framework package maker
• Raphael Stolt's Blog: Rails for PHP Developers book review
• David Otton's Blog: PHP Tip: Classes Aren't Derived From stdClass

In a new tutorial from the IBM developerWorks site starts off a new series looking at creating some games, from start to finish.

PHP is an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, widely accessible programming language. It's well suited for developing simple scripts you can use to help you in all kinds of games. Whether you play simple pen-and-paper games by yourself, complex tabletop role-playing games with a group of people, or online games of any kind, this series will have something for you. Each article in this "30 game scripts you can write in PHP" series will cover 10 scripts in 300 words or less (3d10 stands for "roll three 10-sided dice") simple enough for even a beginning developer, but useful enough for a seasoned game player.

The ten scripts they walk you through are things like a die roller, a name generator, a deck builder/shuffler, a poker dealer and a crossword helper.

WebReference.com continues their series looking at user administration in content management systems. This time they look at the importance of user roles and some code to add to help manage them.

Although the operations are simple, it is vital that they be handled correctly. It is generally a poor principle to allow access to the mechanisms of a system rather than providing an interface through class methods. The latter approach ideally allows the creation of a robust interface that changes relatively infrequently, while details of implementation can be modified without affecting the rest of the system.

Their code includes methods to get all roles for a user, check to see which they are permitted to use, add a "permit" role and remove it back out. The tutorial is an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development (Martin Brampton).

Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:

Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.

His series of articles covers:

• Frameworks
• Wikis
• Content Management Systems
• Debugging
• Blogware

The PHPro.org website has this new tutorial posted today - a step further into the would of OOP in PHP with a look at abstraction, hierarchies and polymorphism.

The PHP Object Oriented method of programming brings many exciting possibilities to application code. Many of the theories surrounding PHP Object Oriented code comes from some simple concepts. To the new comer, some of these concepts seem a little abstract, and with good reason. Abstraction is a key concept on Object Oriented code, but to the un-initiated, may seem rather vague.

Kevin looks at creating abstract classes as a foundation for types other classes can work from, overriding built in classes (like extending the DirectoryIterator to make a DirectoryReader class).

In a new article on the Hiveminds website, one of their columnists, Carl shares his skewed perception of PHP - mainly that it's just not a profession (like .NET is).

I have to say that I am more in agreement with this line of thinking now than I was a couple of years ago. Regardless of how many Facebooks and Diggs show up on the web PHP will always only be given the same importance as HTML or JavaScript. PHP is something that is part of a skill set not something that you can say you do and be taken seriously as a web programmer. This was true 3 years ago is true now and quite honestly will be the case for many more years

He provides some results to back up his assumption, but they seem a bit tainted by his Microsoft slant on things (popularity rankings of 51.5% for ASP.NET but only 6.0% for PHP). He favors Visual Studio for development and suggests that there are no commercial CMSes for PHP.