The Zend Framework has always been my favorite PHP framework. The thing I love about this framework is that its components are loosely coupled. That is to say that its components have well-defined, and well-thought out dependencies. If you don’t like certain components, you don’t have to use them. Other frameworks boast this kind of modularity, but honestly I haven’t seen any that really back it up. For our last two or three PHP projects, we gave CakePHP a try. At first I was really happy with cake because of how quickly I was able to wire frame an application, but the more I use it the more I realize that the components in cake are far too coupled and there is just too damn much “auto-magic” going on in cake. I really prefer explicit to implicit code.

The reason we decided to leave Zend and go to CakePHP was because it lacked two main components that made it very difficult to wire frame applications quickly and easily. Those components are a layout system, and a form manager. I am happy to announce that Zend has tackled both of these problems in this release, and has actually done a decent job on them. Neither of them are 100% yet (at least not in my opinion), but both are very usable and helpful at the very least. Go grab a copy of the new release and give it a go. I think you’ll be quite happy with it!

For a full list of the new features, check out the official release page on zend developer zone.0

UPDATE! - Zend Developer Zone has published a webinar on Zend_View and Zend_Layout by Ralph Schindler. Go check it out!

Website: www.buttebusinessresources.com
Formula:

• Content Management System
• Clean/verbose urls
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• CSS2.1
• Word Press integration

Debut: March, 2008

Chabin Concepts and MC2 Design are proud to announce the release of Butte County’s new regional economic development and business resource site: ButteBusinessResources.com. Designed and developed by MC2, the site is geared to be a central location for businesses in Butte County to find resources in business development, funding, marketing, business expansion, human resources, and consulting.

Ollie Saunders, a colleague of mine and a regular at the DevNetwork forums has put together a very slick little set of functions he has collectively termed “PHP Fluidics”. If there is one thing that really sucks about PHP, it’s how often you have to use temporary variables to get to methods or array elements you need. Fluidics makes this process (and several others) much easier. We use this library in just about everything we code these days and I’d like to point out a few reasons why.

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Website: www.overlandequipment.com
Formula:

• Ecommerce/Miva
• Clean/verbose urls
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
• CSS2.1
• Dealer database application

Debut: February, 2008

MC2 Design is please to announce Overland Equipment’s web site launch for the 2008 product year. We have been fortunate to work with Overland Equipment since 2001, designing and developing their corporate website. Overland Equipment is a designer and manufacturer of quality bags since 1981.

MC2 Design’s development team attended the MIVA Merchant 2008 Conference in San Diego, California, held at the Marina Village Conference Centers on Feb 28,29 and March 1st. MIVA Merchant announced exciting new features with its pending release of version 5.5, which released in Beta March 2nd and is slated for streamed release as an upgrade from 5.0, early to mid April 2008. MC2 came away from the event very encouraged about the vision and future of Miva Merchant as an enterprise level application. The management team of MIVA Merchant provided a very informative, approachable experience, letting merchants, developers, and designers know that they are here to stay. For additional information on this conference and version 5.5 see this article

jQuery has long been our favorite javascript library for things such as simple effects, ajax, and other behavior-related tasks. There is one place I’ve always thought jQuery could use improvement, and that is their UI elements. Well I’m pleased to announce that is all about to change.

jQuery UI is growing, and I’m already seeing quite a few sites using it exclusively to support their interface. As a matter of fact, it’s growing so well, that a LA-based open-source company decided to hire a person to exclusively work on jQuery UI full-time.

More

If you have ever used bbcode or any other non-html markup language in an attempt to avoid having to filter user-submitted HTML, those days are over. HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant html filter. This means that not only does it protect your website from security risks such as cross-site scripting attacks, but it also produces completely valid (x)html. It is also character-encoding aware. With this release, the author, Edward Z. Yang has decided to GoPHP5, so don’t expect to see this version released for PHP4 (The 2.1.x branch will be maintained until PHP 4 is completely deprecated, but no new features will be added to it.).

This release a number of improvements in CSS handling, including the filter HTMLPurifier_Filter_ExtractStyleBlocks which integrates HTML Purifier with CSSTidy for cleaning style sheets (see the source code file for more information on usage), contains experimental support for proprietary CSS properties with %CSS.Proprietary, case-insensitive CSS properties, and more lenient hexadecimal color codes. Also, all code has been upgraded to full PHP 5 and is E_STRICT clean for all versions of PHP 5 (including the 5.0 series, which previously had parse-time errors).

For more details about the release, check out HTML Purifier’s website.

On November 21, 2007 www.OllyDog.com rolled out a new site design with improved functionality and layout to help it’s dog loving customers find that perfect leash, collar, toy or bed for their best friend. MC2 has continued it’s long term relationship with OllyDog and enjoys being a part of bringing their exceptional products to Olly’s online retails customers. See more details of this launch

On November 15th. 2007 MC2 completed BagSelect.com’s integration and launched it’s Assurz Satisfaction Guaranteed Program.

The Assurz Satisfaction Guarantee gives you a full 90 days to decide if you are fully satisfied with your purchase. If you’re not, the program will refund your money, including sales tax, and shipping fees. And there are no restocking fees.

For more on Assurz visit them here.

I’d just like to announce the release of DOMAssistant 2.0 by Robert Nyman. For those of you who aren’t DOMAsses, the author describes the library as follows:

The idea of DOMAssistant is to provide a simpler and more consistent way to script against the Document Object Model (DOM) in web browsers. The idea is that everything starts with the element in question, and then performs various methods on it, such as adding/removing classes, finding elements with a certain className, applying events to it, etc.

This new release introduces several cool new features:

• Chainability
• Basic Ajax capabilities
• New DOMReady() method to better identify when the DOM is fully loaded
• XPath support

Now, being a jQuery fanatic, I was skeptical of giving this library a try, but I must say that it is actually pretty fun to work with. The chainability added in this newest version makes common tasks very simple, and the code short and easy to understand. Take a look at the following:

  // add an onclick event to #element and add the class "class-name"
  $("element").addEvent("click", function(){
    alert('Thanks for clicking, pally-o!');
  }).addClass('class-name');

Another very cool thing about this library is that it’s pretty small. The entire source code for it is only 10k (compressed, but not gzipped), where jQuery is 26kb (compressed, but not gzipped). On top if that, the library is modular. If you aren’t going to use any ajax, you don’t need to bloat up your source with the ajax functions. There are several modules in the library and you are free to pick and choose which you want to use.

Head on over to the DOMAssistant project page and take a look… don’t be a DOMAss.