• fpdf is probably the most famous of PHP PDF libraries. FPDF project remained inactive for years but was still very usable in its latest version, dated 2004. And finally after 4 years of inactivity a new version finally came out this august 2008, with important features such as GIF image support and possibility to have different page formats in a single document. Most interesting is the additionnal PDFTable class, which does a very good job render HTML table conversion to PDF format. That’s in my opinion the easiest way for a webmaster with good knowledge of  HTML to generate PDF documents.
• TCPDF is another example of an advanced PHP PDF generation library but I haven’t tried it yet. Does seem to support some level of HTML parsing but not to the point of converting HTML tables to PDF (see above)
• ZendPDF is a good bet as a component of Zend Framework but focuses on low level graphic functions and as such lacks essential features such as automatic word wrapping.

Among these 3 popular content management solutions, each on has its own specific features. In a few words

• Wordpress is perfect for community based content websites
• Silverstripe is perfect for basic page management in a multiple level hierarchy, with limited user rights and priviliege system
• Concrete5 is ideal for large organisations with complex user groups and workflow schemas

what they have in common : features we compare

• unlimited hierarchy structure with drag and drop reordering
• a visual form editor
• flexible data schema for tables and records
• wysiwyg editing with advanced media management

comparison table

did they use a code generator ? Romanian developped JobberBase is so nicely coded that we would like to put a name on the framework that intiated this nice lightweight jobboard application. It won’t bother with user registration or profile maintenance:  jobberbase is one of the simplest expression of job listing application, may be even too simple to be true. Great work has been put into the design of the frond and back using MVC paradigm, Jquery helpers and smarty templates. Good job. More @ http://www.jobberbase.com/

My last article on Silvesrtripe CMS online image editing feature led me to investigate alternative solution for websites and software developers that wish to implement this kind of component for their backoffice.. Surfing on CAKEPHP framework homepage turned out to illustrate perfectly the kind of component that should be standard on all CMS : resizing is now pretty common, and what we want now is cropping. There is actually a plugin for jquery that does the interface job, ImgAreaSelect. ImgAreaSelect come with loads of configuration options that make it a perfect tool for cropping images : the selection area is responsive, draggable, and can be adjusted to work only within specified limits or predefined aspect ratio. What’s missing in Jquery is the server side of things, and you’ll find that either on webmotionUK for pure PHP or on CAKEPHP’s site for Cake integration.

function make_url($string){

$pattern = “([^[[:alnum:]|[:space:]|[:blank:]])+”;
$anchor = ereg_replace($pattern, ”, strtolower($string));
$pattern = “([[:space:]]|[[:blank:]])+”;
$anchor = ereg_replace($pattern, ‘-’, $anchor);
return short_name($anchor); // return the short filtered name
} # end function