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.

One common example is when you need to instantiate an object and call a method on it. Normally, you’d have to do something like the following.

$person = new MC2_Person(23);
$person->getFullName();

While this isn’t all that painful when you only need to do it once, in even a moderate sized project, you’ll need to do something like this hundreds of times. Now let’s look at the fluidics way to do this.

with(new MC2_person(23))->getFullName();

Another extremely useful function in fluidics is the dindex function. After using python for the last few months I have really grown fond of the built-in dictionary method get(). What it does is allow you to request an index on an array (called a dictionary in python) and if it doesn’t exist, you can provide a default. In python the syntax is like dict.get(‘key’, ‘defaultval’). In fluidics it’s like this:

$lunch = array('snack' => 'cheetos', 'drink' => 'mountain dew');
$drink = dindex($lunch, "drink", "pepsi"); // returns "mountain dew"
$sandwich = dindex($lunch, "sandwich", "ham"); // returns "ham"

I could sit here and list all the functions that make this little library so useful, but Ollie does a better job of it anyway, so check out his googlecode project. I hope you like it as much as I did. 

Read more about fluidics here.
Ollie Saunders’ Blog

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 pleased 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.

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

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. 

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.

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.