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This is an update to original Chat Room we published here on CSS-Tricks. In some ways, the technology is the same. We are going to employ PHP to talk to the server, jQuery to keep the chat rolling, and the chats themselves will be stored in .txt files just like the first version.

In part one of the “ASP.NET for PHP Developers” tutorial, we learned the basics of ASP.NET and the C# language. Part two builds on that foundation, and introduces some more advanced features and techniques to take your ASP.NET pages to the next level.

PHP has a cool function that automatically highlights PHP code called highlight_string(); Theoretically this could be used to roll your own code highlighting on a site, rather than rely on JavaScript or some kind of external service to do it. In this article I’ll show you the basics of how it works, then extended it with a few tricks. Since JavaScript is so similar to PHP in syntax, we can trick the function into highlighting JavaScript code as well. Then finally how we can bust out some smarts to auto-tab the code.

Symfony 2.0 has a preview release now available online. It leads a new generation of PHP frameworks. Based on an innovative architecture, Symfony 2 is fast, flexible, and easy to learn. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP.

So you can work with PHP, and have a basic understanding of jQuery, but you haven’t yet figured out how to combine the two into your projects? If so, we’ve got you covered today! In this Plus tutorial, you’ll learn how to take advantage of PHP’s MySQL improved and prepared statements to query a database, how to request that returned data with jQuery, and then how to filter through the returned items and display them on the page, adding a touch of animations. If this sounds interesting, give back to Nettuts+, and become a Plus member to watch this helpful video tutorial!

Wordpress is a powerful engine in itself, but sometimes themes need options that fall outside the core dashboard. The good news is that putting these changes into motion is not as complex as it once was. This is where custom option panels come in.

In this tutorial we’ll use a custom options panel to insert analytic tracking codes. This will be done using the recent Wordpress 2.9 updates to options. The same fundamentals can be carried over to a number of other custom field applications in you own themes.

Option Panel Fundamentals