Chris Shiflett's Blog: PHP Advent Calendar 2007
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Now that it's all wrapped up, Chris Shiflett has posted his own look back at the PHP Advent calendar he coordinated.   Coordinating this turned out to be a lot of work, but I hope to do it again next year. [...] With a little bit of prodding, we all hopefully learned a little more than we would have otherwise, and the people who were gracious enough to share something deserve our thanks.   You can check out his post (and, of course, our own) for a complete list of all twenty-four days.
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Chris Shiflett has posted his own recap of the (just passed) php|works conference up in Toronto over on his blog.   I've been traveling non-stop since php|works, so I haven't had a chance to reflect on the conference, what I learned, who I met, and things like that. (Zak has been doing a good job of this lately, and I'd like to follow his lead.) I've probably forgotten more than I remember, but this is my recap.   Included in the things he mentions are:  The people he was able to meet (like Joshua Eichorn and Sebastian Bergmann) The talks he gave ("Truth about XSS" and "Agile PHP Testing") His interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone The PHP 5 Certification and Wez Furlong's "Not PDO" talk
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans has posted a quick look at one of the new offerings from the Manning Publishing group - "PHP in Action".   My buddy Olivia over at Manning Publications sent us a present recently. They are working on the title PHP in Action and they sent us a chapter to share with you. PHP in Action is scheduled to release in April of this year but it's available now in "Manning Early Release Program", or MEAP. MEAP is a cool program that allows you to buy the book long before it is released and have access to the chapters as they are released. Then, when the final dead-tree edition ships, they will send you one. The great thing is, there is no additional cost for MEAP.   He links to the book's description on the Manning site and gives some credit to the authors, Dagfinn Reiersol with Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. And, of course, the link to the sample chapter from the book - a look at Design Patterns.
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Damien Seguy has submitted this month's update to the Nexen.net PHP statistics for the month of December 2007:   PHP adoption statistics for December 2007 are released. Here are the monthly highlights:   PHP 5 is now running on 27.8% of the servers PHP 5.2 usage will pass PHP 4.3 by April PHP 5.2.5 is 8.7% of the PHP 5 market    You can get more information on this month's stats over on the Nexen.net website - the evolution stats and the full stats for December 2007.
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There is a new column from the folks over at PHP Magazine for your enjoyment:
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Cal Evans has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through Cal's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.   There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and Cal highlights just a few:  AJAX Optimization talks  An overview of some Flickr Stats Google's mashup offerings An introduction to  and some talk of benchmarking Ajax  Check out the full post though - it's jam-packed with links and some great event information.
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A quick post from janschneider.de talks about questions regarding the PHP5 compatibility of Horde, IMP, or other applications on the Horde mailing list
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Elizabeth Naramore has been kind enough to let us know that the schedule for this year's PHP Appalachia conference has been posted over on their site.   The schedule includes plenty of relaxing time spent camping, hiking and even a few PHP-related discussions thrown in, just for something different. Two official speakers are giving their talks first thing on Day Two and Day Three:  Ben Ramsey on REST Chris Spruck on Regex  There will also be some Lightning Talks for those interested during Day Two. Check out the full schedule for everyhting happening in this great three day event.
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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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Chris Shiflett has posted his look back at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo on his blog today.   It has been more than two weeks since ZendCon, yet I can't seem to manage to find the time to recap the event. (Work has been keeping me busy.) This will be brief.   In the post, he talks about the attendees, his security talk, the community deck of cards, Wez Furlong's talk, and more. Check out his post for more info on the conference and what all went on.
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Both Chris Shiflett and Eli White has posted reminders/comments about the upcoming DC PHP Conference happening November 7th through the 9th in Washington, D.C..   Eli mentions the talk he will be giving ("my stock 'High Performance' talk") and Chris points out the two talks being given by other OmniTIers - Paul Jones on framework and application benchmarking and Nate with a look at CakePHP   Registration for the conference is still open so you can still get in on this great three day event with sessions on topics like API design, MySQL security, lots of Facebook talk and where PHP fits in with today's politics.
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P&aacute;draic Brady, looking ahead to the work he will be doing over the next few months, is proposing on his blog about a new Zend Framework component - Zend_Service_Currency.    I did a quick check on what PHP classes are available for the purpose. There's really not a whole lot out there. There's a PEAR class along the lines I need, but it's released under the PHP License and, not to be too argumentative, I prefer non-PEAR solutions where the end-user may have no access to update PEAR.   So since the project is planned to use the Zend Framework, I shot off a mail to the Framework's fw-general mailing list to see if it would be a worthwhile contribution.    He sees that someone else had already opened a proposal for the same idea and decided to join with that group to work up the module. He also links to his original proposal and gives a brief overview of the goals of the package.
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Ilia Alshanetsky has an announcement on his blog today about the release of the next candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.2 series - PHP 5.2.0RC5.    After 2 weeks of inaction 5.2.0 final release is finally in sight. A few minutes ago I've released the last (I mean it this time) release candidate of 5.2.0, RC5. If all goes well a week from now 5.2.0 final will be out ready for use. In the meantime I'd like to ask once again that everyone try this RC, which can downloaded from here.   I don't think you'd be able to find any major issues or regressions in this RC, but if you do certainly let me know, if necessary RC6 is not out of the question.    The more this new release is downloaded and tested, the faster we all get PHP 5.2 - so get out there and get testing!   The Windows builds have also already been created courtesy of Edin Kadribasic.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Dave Dash's Blog: nginx and symfonyZend Developer Zone: The ZendCon Sessions Episode 6: Project Management Methods to Maintain IT StandSitePoint PHP Blog: Tokenization using regular expression sub patternsIT Jobs Watch: Results for PHP Developers in LondonJob Posting: Digital River Seeks PHP Developer (Eden Prairie, MN)Dan Scott's Blog: Oooh...looks like I've got (even more) work cut out for meLeon Chevalier's Blog: Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of codePHPWomen.org: elePHPantsPhil Thompson's Blog: 7 PHP functions that saved my lifeStuart Herbert's Blog: Using suphp To Secure A Shared Server
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Ben Ramsey has put together a dashboard widget to grab the latest from the Funcaday.com website (spotlights one PHP function each day).   While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.   TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.
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Even though it's technically March, we still wanted to announce that the latest issue of the International PHP Magazine (the February 2007 edition) has been published.   Volume 14 of the International PHP Magazine is now available on virtual newsstands. Spam prevention, Web 2.0 security challenges, refactoring, PHP functions, Rich Internet Application (RIA) implementation, and open source licensing are the topics covered by experts in Issue 02.07 of PHP Magazine.   The cover story for this issue is from Steph Fox concerning methods that developers can use for preventing spam on their site. You can get full details on the rest of the issue from its announcement on their site.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.