As we learned in our Regular Expressions Primer, regular expressions can be simple or extremely complex. However, there are a few concepts that were left out. Today we are going to cover one of those concepts... grouping.

Pattern recognition is a very hard thing to get right, and as a developer it can be as easy as a few lines of code or more than you can count with fingers and toes. Today we are going to go over a very common tool used for text pattern recognition: regular expression. So let's get started and dive right in.

In part one, we covered the basics of how Drupal themes work and the base files that are used. We left off on template files, which are the heart of Drupal themes. Today we are going to continue with template files and give some examples of ones every theme will most likely use.

Drupal is a very powerful, and extensible, CMS and with release of Drupal 7 we saw even more power added to it. However, Drupal has always been known to have a fairly steep learning curve, with a whole lot of new concepts to learn. Today we hope to break some of that curve by showing you how to start your Drupal theme, and bring your Drupal site an exciting new look.

The Elusive ===

PHP is what they call a "loosely" typed language. This means that if you have "105", it could mean you have the string "105" or you can use this as a number, adding and subtracting to your heart's content. One thing that gets a little tricky in PHP because of this fact is the number 0. Since PHP tries its best to determine what you want from your variables, 0 can mean 0 or false...and sometimes this makes things a bit difficult. Luckily we have the ===.

Wordpress is an extremely powerful content management system, and while we are drupal heads over here at SOTC, Wordpress is still to be loved and respected. It offers not only users, but also developers an easy to use system that allows easy content construction and management. Today, using Wordpress 3.0.1, we are going to make a very simple Wordpress plugin that will introduce you to the basics of developing in the Wordpress system.

Design is important on any project. Anything from the user interface down to the button icons are an important part of the overall design. But when you are on the web, there is one design element that slacks big time when it comes to choices: fonts. Typefaces on the web have been a major complaint of web designers since the web began, and there is no real trend that shows there will be support for more than just web-safe fonts anytime soon. To make things worse, there is not much you can do about the issue. Images seem to be the most widely used and accepted medium for custom type-facing, but today we will discuss another choice: sIFR.

One of the neat things about World of Warcraft is the amount of data freely available. Between sources like Thottbot, Wowhead, and WoW Armory you can find information on just about anything in the game. The WoW Armory is even more interesting because it sends all of its data to the browser in xml. This makes it really easy to consume this data through web requests. This tutorial is about building a small application that searches the Armory for items.

Today, I am going to go over something a little different from my normal regiment. Lately, I have been messing around with creating IM bots, mainly for GTalk, but I have thrown in AIM also. I feel between those two I am covering a decent amount of instant messaging ground. In this tutorial I am going to show how to build an IM bot that will connect to GTalk and optionally multiple other services.

So far in our Cake tutorials, we have learned the basics of CakePHP, and used some pretty time saving and neat features. Thus far, most of these features we have implemented have been easy fixes to small issues, that save at most a few hundred of code. Today, we will be using a really neat view/controller combo that will make creating a paginated view as easy as.....well, cake!