April 24-27, 2006 has been set aside for this year's MySQL Users Conference, to be held in Santa Clara, California. If you're a MySQL user, the 75 sessions will surely offer something for you. PHP-related speakers include Rasmus Lerdorf, and George Schlossnagle, Arjen Lentz, Michael Radwin, and Laura Thomson. For more info, visit the official conference site: http://www.mysqluc.com/.

php|architect is sponsoring another free webcast in their php|symphony series, entitled "Make the most of MySQL with phpMyAdmin" hosted by Marc Delisle, one of the lead developers of this essential tool. This webcast will take place on February 3rd, 2006 at 1PM Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5:00). To sign up, go to: http://phparchitect.com/shop_product.php?itemid=104.

If your'e a PEAR user, you'll want to make sure you're running the latest and greatest PEAR release, available at http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR/download/. This is mainly a bug fix, but very important, as stressed by Greg Beaver in his recent blog post (http://greg.chiaraquartet.net/).

Ilia Alshanetsky lets us know that the final RC for the latest version of PHP 5.1.2 has been released, and he is encouraging anyone and everyone to test it prior to the scheduled final release date of January 12. You can visit Ilia's blog for the download links and keys at http://ilia.ws/archives/100-PHP-5.1.2RC2-Released!.html

Many PHP developers have written their own opinions on where PHP has been and where it might be going. A few of the more interesting ones include:

• Chris Cornutt (aka enygma) - A (Lengthy) Look Back at PHP in 2005
• Richard Davey - Will the Zend Framework Save PHP?
• Sean Michael Kerner (internetnews.com) - 3 Versions, 1 Promise
• Derick Rethans - PHP Look Back 2005

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:

• Date_Holidays 0.15.0 - Driver based class to calculate holidays.
• HTTP_Download 1.1.1 - Send HTTP Downloads
• Text_LanguageDetect 0.1.1 - Language detection class
• Text_Wiki_Mediawiki 0.0.1 - Mediawiki parser for Text_Wiki
• Text_Diff 0.2.0 - Engine for performing and rendering text diffs
• PEAR 1.4.6 - PEAR Base System
• Text_LanguageDetect 0.1.0 - Language detection class
• Image_Color2 0.1.4 - Color conversion and mixing for PHP5
• Config 1.10.5 - Your configurations swiss-army knife

And for PECL, we had:

• Fileinfo - libmagic bindings
• GDChart - GDChart Based Graphing Interface
• ncurses - Terminal screen handling and optimization package
• odbtp - ODBTP client functions
• pecl_http - Extended HTTP Support
• yaz - Z39.50 client for PHP

As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net and http://pecl.php.net.

See you next week with more tidbits from the PHP world!