The PEAR Blog: PEAR communities (LinkedIn & Facebook)
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A quick post to the PEAR blog today points out two groups that, whether you're a PEAR user or not, you might want to be a part of - one on LinkedIn and the other on Facebook.   These groups are primarily for fun, but also act as networking tools to get to know the people who are developing and using PEAR.  The official support channels for PEAR are still the mailing lists and bug tracker, and are listed at http://pear.php.net/support.php   To find either, log into your account and search for the term "PEAR". It'll be on the list.
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In this new entry on his blog, Jacob Santos is officialy ringing his own sort of death knell for phpBB in the form of recommending a move to FUDForum.   The development of phpBB 3 has been past due for a long time. In my humble and not so educated opinion, it has faded (or if it hasn't already, it will fade) into obscurity. The phpBB 2.x development line has been overtaken by other forum projects, including better security in their package. SMF offers many of the features that will appear in phpBB 3 and also offers phpBB ease of installation and use.   He goes on to talk about the "upcoming release" of phpBB 3 but reminds us of the fact that it might be "another 2 or 3 years" before the update. If they ever get it out, though, (and it lives up to expectations) it'll be great.   Jacob then looks at FUDForum (a project involving Ilia Alshanetsky) and praises it for its integration skills and simplicity. It even includes APIs to help integrate the install of FUDForum with the databases from other popular message boards.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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As posted on Ben Ramsey's blog (and released out through the PHP community) - a press release about PHP Groups:    PHP Groups, a worldwide network for PHP user groups, launched today with the intent to foster an open community for PHP user groups to share and exchange ideas and information. Membership is open to anyone working with a PHP user group or interested in starting one.   At present, PHP Groups provides a mailing list where user group leaders and those interested may subscribe and take part in a dialog with other user groups. "I hope that part of our accomplishments will involve uniting and bringing together for an open dialog all of the PHP user groups across the world," said Ramsey. "I hope this mailing list can get that conversation going."    If you're interested in the project and want to get involved, check out their mailing list and website to get complete details.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Matthew O'Phinney's Blog: svn:externals (and the Zend Framework)Mark Jaquith's Blog: WordPress 2.0.6: Feedburner issue, and fixJob Posting: Unborn Media Inc Seeks PHP/MySQL Developer (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone: Tutorial : Using Zend Framework Without PDONetmag.co.uk: Make your own SoapChristopher Jones' Blog: Duplicate Columns in "2 Day Plus PHP Developer Guide"International PHP Magazine: Poll Question: Which is the Best PHP MVC Framework?William Candillon's Blog: phpAspect alpha 0.1.0 is released!Community News: phpthrowdown Registration OpenZend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Part Tutorial 6 : Updating the User ListIBM developerWorks: U2 PDO Driver Tutorial, Parts 1 & 2Stoyan Stefanov's Blog: Reusing an existing database connection with MDB2DevShed: Introducing the Memento PatternNexen.net: PHP statistics for December 2006Sandro Groganz's Blog: Syntax Highlighting & Migrating Permalinks in WordPress
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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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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHPBuilder.com: Using Ajax with PHP to Create an Interactive Web PageJSLabs Blog:  Top 5 PHP ToolsLorenzo Alberton's Blog: Navigation Through Paragraphs in an ArticleChristopher Jones' Blog: Review: Easy Oracle PHPStoyan Stefanov's Blog: The PEAR bookScott Mattocks' Blog: Crisscott OnForce Client DesktopDevShed: Developing a Form Director ClassDevShed: Creating a Simple Threaded Discussion ForumLeendert Brouwer's Blog: Writing Secure Web Applications with PHPPower Creative Seeks Interactive Developer/Analyst (Louisville, KY)PHP Security Consortium: New Product Launch - PHPSecInfoMarket Day: At A Glance: ASP.net vs. PHPJob Posting: LAMP Developer (PHP/MySQL) (Nashville, TN)Community News: Symfony Turns OneBard Farstad's Blog: Optimizing PHP for Intel based Mac
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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To be, or not to be: Now Facebook users can decide.
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The social networking site -- once the exclusive domain of students and
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Christopher Jones' Blog: Review: PHP Web ProgrammingCommunity News: PHP Conference BrasilWebReference.com: Creating a Custom RSS Feed with PHP and MySQLThe Shadow Fox Network: Create Dynamic URLs With Mod_Rewrite and PHP FunctionsJoshua Eichorn's Blog: Official WebThumb Contest rules publishedDevshed: PHP EmailHowTo Forge: Installing A LAMP System With Fedora Core 6ThinkPHP Blog: Oracle with PHP and PDODevShed: Creating an Administration Area for a Simple Threaded Discussion ForumDevShed: Setting up the Foundation for an Extensible Website Engine with PHP 5PHPBuilder.com: PEAR's HTML_QuickFormAndi Gutmans' Blog:  PHP and Database Connection PoolingInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: The Biggest Advantage of PHP 5 is?Greg Beaver's Blog: PhpDocumentor 1.3.1 is releasedAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Practical PHP events
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PHP was a great year for the PHP community and had both his high moments and its lows (just like any other community on the web) so, in lieu of our usual monthly recap type of year en post, we present a summary of some of the things that happened this past year:  2007 Gave us:  Plenty to talk about on namespaces GoPHP5 EMFs (Even More Frameworks) the mysqlnd driver lots of new tutorials over 2,500 new PEAR and PECL package releases Several new PHP releases (5.2.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 5.2.2, 4.4.7, 5.2.3, 5.2.4 and 5.2.5) The End of Life for PHP 4 The Month of PHP Bugs A move for PHP in the Enterprise a renewed effort for Unicode support releases from the major framework players like CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Solar IBM and Oracle working together with Zend Over 130 new job postings Increased interest in running PHP on Windows (FastCGI!) The creation of and episodes 1 through 30 of the Zend Developer Zone podcast PHP Abstract   Books:  The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites PHP and MySQL by Example PHP Solutions PHP Programming with PEAR PHP in Action Pro Drupal Development The eZ Components Developers Handbook The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition) Learning PHP Data Objects Enterprise PHP Development (announced)   Conferences:  5th Annual eZ Conference Vancouver PHP Conference php|tek 2007 Dutch PHP Conference SymfonyCamp php|works 2007 Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2007 (including the Unconference) DC PHP Conference 2007 PHP London 2007 Conference   I know there's stuff out there that I've missed, so comment away and let the community know! (I might come back and link all of these things later on)
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On The Bakery today, there's three new examples of how the CakePHP framework was used to create three very different types of sites - PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and a simple iPhone-compatible application.   In the first article they describe how they built a "powerful, full featured CMS" to allow their customers to login and work with their personal information. It included the use of JSON messaging and the use of dynamic libraries. The article for the second site talks about the creation of a search engine for science videos to provide a more reliable resource for fellow video enthusiasts. He talks about what all he learned in the process and the design of the application. Check out the end result here. Finally, the third article talks about the creation of an application for the iPhone - "an app that would allow other users to add RSS feeds and I could go look for some and add them to my collection". He details the process he went through to create the application and the modules that he used to accomplish it.   Check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related articles and tutorials.
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In this new blog post, Hartmut Holzgraefe talks about his experiences with the Graphviz library and its integration with PEAR.    We've had PHP Graphviz support in PEAR for quite a while but only by passing graph description files to graphviz binaries running in seperate processes and by collection their output files later.   Now it is possible to create graphs by adding nodes, edges and node and edge attributes to a graph within PHP itself.    He's even created a trac site for deonstration and downloading of this new bit of functionality. There's also some documentation in a simple manual on the trac pages as well.
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David Coallier has an update today on the effort to get PEAR developers all over the world mapped out to a Google map to show their locations - one that's finally been launched.   Over the past weeks we have had many people asking around if it would be possible to have a place to see the pear developers around the world. Well now Christian Weiske and I (With the help of Arnaud Limbourg) have put up a nice little map system on pear.php.net. You can see it at http://pear.php.net/map/   David also links to images of some of the administration panels for the application (one, two, three) and the connection information for a web service (REST) that allows access to all of the data.
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Travis Swicegood has posted a book review he's done on the PEAR  Installer Manifesto, a book by Greg Beaver detailing the use of the PEAR installer, channels and the creation of a blogging application to put them both to use.   From Travis' review:   This past weekend I read through the PEAR Installer Manifesto. For anyone who's not familiar the PEAR installer and how it can be used in projects outside of PEAR, I would point them to this book. [...] This is a four star rating, so there were a few things that weren't exactly what I had hoped for. I hoped this would serve as a full reference to the installer. While this book takes you a lot of great jumping off points, it doesn't have the thoroughness I wanted.   The book does cover things like how to create and work with PEAR channels and how to create a custom plug-in system by embedding the Installer into an application. Overall, he gives the book positive marks with only a few complaints (like the lack of a full reference to the installer being included).