Patrick Reilly's Blog: Join the PHP Evangelism Team - Mailing List
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Patrick Reilly has posted about a new group that's being formed in the PHP world - a PHP Evangelism Team designed to help promote the language.   The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.   They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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Christian Wenz, back from the php/db|works conference and at a break following the conference, has posted some of his thoughts about this years conference over on his blog.   My schedule was crammed right after php|works 2006, so I could not find an earlier possibility to blog. Anyway, the extended entry contains my short report on php|arch's second conference this year.   He talks about some sightseeing before-hand, Tutorial Day, XML Security demos, Unicode in PHP6, a "slight problem" concerning his laptop, and his role on the Zend PHP5 Certification Panel. Check out the full entry for all of the details and "expect a separate blog entry later" on his experience on the panel.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Ian Selby's Blog: Uploading Large Files With PHPONLamp.com: Quick and Clean PHP FormsDotVoid.com: Reordering nested sets using PHP and JavascriptRob Allen's Blog: Zend Framework Book Coming SoonCommunity News: php|works Daily Summaries (Day 2)Community News: Sara Golemon & Christopher Jones - First Day Summaries of php|worksJob Posting: University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine Seeks Web Developer (Madison, WI)Zend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 19: Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack FrameworksStefan Mischook's Blog: Installing PHP and MySQL on the Mac with MAMPSecurityReason: Three Advisories for PHP 5.2.4 (dl, iconv_substr & setlocale)
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Patrick Reilly has a new post today encouraging developers out there looking for an opportunity to volunteer in the community to check out the Zend Framework project's many needs.   Most components and subprojects need volunteers to help with documentation, unit test coverage, code reviews, improving integration with other ZF components, and enhancing architecture and design for the purpose of improving extensibility and ease of use with new components. If you see a subject area or component that interests you, please contact any project members currently associated with the component.   The project is starting several wiki "websites" dedicated to each of the components/efforts inside of the main framework project. Areas for these include:  Auth Team Documentation Team MVC Team Web Services Team
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Joshua Eichorn has posted some slides that he presented at a local PHP User Group meeting just passed that serve as an introduction to PEAR.   I'm hoping to improve the slides a bit and give this presentation at lots of other places. If any PHP User groups on the west coast would like me to do a presentation about PEAR drop my a line.   To help further the cause of PEAR, he's also offering the slides in an archived file for presentation anywhere.
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In an effort to somewhat unify the authors of the wide range of PHP database abstraction layers out there in the community, Lukas Smith has proposed a "doctrine miling list" for the discussion of things "like best practices, new discoveries, challenges, etc".    Now I am hoping that all of you are reading this. I know quite a few of you pretty well already (John, Hans, Manuel etc.). [...] So please everybody come out of the woodwork, send me a mail or post a comment.   While I think its fine for end users to also join the list, the goal is not to create a list for end users to ask questions, but more for people who actively develop database abstraction layers. End users should better go to the respective mailing lists.    Ian P. Christian has already stepped up to the plate and is offering a mailing list that you, the database abstraction developer can subscribe to - mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net. Be sure to check out the comments for more great discussion.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Symfony Project: Book preview: read the Unit Tests chapterWebCheatSheet.com: Secure File Upload with PHPMichi Kono's Blog: The Best PHP Book Out ThereThe Bakery: Basic User Authentication in (CakePHP) 1.2.xPHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPDavid Coallier's Blog: Zend_Db Without PDO part #3 (SVN Repository)?Community News: PHPLondon Conference 2007 AnnouncedMatthew O'Phinney's Blog: Overloading arrays in PHP 5.2.0Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: 5.2.1 RC3 Released for testingJob Posting: Telio Telecom AS Seeks Senior Web Developer (Oslo, Norway)The Bakery: LightTPD and CakePHP setup in subdirectoriesJob Posting: Yahoo! Seeks Address Book Front-End Engineer (Sunnyvale, CA)HowTo Forge: PHP Programming BasicsJob Posting: Blue State Digital Seeks PHP/AJAX developer for politcal/tech consulting (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Tutorial Part 7 : Usability Improvements
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PHP-Editors has some new information today about a series of free publications that you could recieve if you are one of "those who qualify".
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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Luke Welling takes a humorous look at something he misses in PHP - register globals being set to on.    I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company [...] so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them. I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.   I really like register_globals in PHP.    He reminicies about the days gone by of being able to assume that register_globals is turned on, the days of simpler, lighter code that's even easier for the newbies to get into. Anyone for a tshirt?
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:FCHouse.com: Debugging PHP5 with Eclipse PDT under OSX: a piece of cake!Tutorial: An Introduction to PHPIDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System)Developer.com: Build Multi-lingual Websites With the Zend FrameworkPro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for June 14th, 2007Community News: VS.PHP v2.3 for Visual Studio ReleasedJob Posting: S&ME, Inc. Seeks Web Developer (Charlotte, NC)Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 06.15.2007Nexen.net: Ext/elephpant : the furry PHP mascotJob Posting: Coolpink Seeks a PHP Developer (Leeds, Yorkshire, UK)Job Posting: BravoTECH Seeks a PHP Developer (Dallas, TX)
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A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.   Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.   He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.
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Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.   There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)   Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.    Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.   Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.
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The Hiveminds Magazine has pointed out a new effort that's been kicked off today to try to get the PHP community (and providers) to finally make the leap and drop PHP4 support all together:   The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.   They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".   It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum  required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.   There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).
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In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:    I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.   We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.    Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.