Zend has almost reached it's 1000th Zend Certified Engineer, and to commemorate, they've created a nice little elite logo for the first 1000. While I can't say I'm a part of the first 1000, maybe I'd have taken the test if I knew this would be my prize. Knowing my luck, I'd be number 1001. At any rate, while I didn't see anything official on the Zend site, several others have blogged about it (Andi Gutmans, for one). So if you're among the first 1000 make sure you get your logo from Zend.

php|architect has released the schedule of speakers and topics for the upcoming php|tek conference in Orlando, April 26-28. The speaker list includes such prestigious names as Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Lukas Smith, Paul Reinheimer, Christian Wenz, Sara Golemon, Davey Shafik, Marcus Baker, Andrei Zmievski, Ilia Alshanetsky, Chris Shiflett, Jason Sweat, Johannes Schlueter, Scott Johnson, Marcus Boerger, Caroline Maynard and John Coggleshall. For more info or to register, go to http://phparchitect.com/tek/

PHP.net lets us know that PHP 5.1.2 and 4.4.2 have officially been released (5.1.2 release announcement: http://www.php.net/release_5_1_2.php and 4.4.2 release announcement: http://www.php.net/release_4_4_2.php). 5.1.2 is a security release but also fixes approx. 85 bugs and throws in a few new features as well. 4.4.2 is mostly a bug fix release. To download either, go to http://www.php.net/downloads.php.

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

• HTTP_WebDAV_Server 1.0.0rc2 - WebDAV Server Baseclass.
• Date_Holidays 0.15.1 - Driver based class to calculate holidays.
• XML_RPC 1.4.5 - PHP implementation of the XML-RPC protocol
• MDB2_Driver_ibase 0.2.1 - ibase MDB2 driver
• MDB2_Schema 0.4.2 - XML based database schema manager
• MDB2_Driver_oci8 0.2.3 - oci8 MDB2 driver
• MDB2_Driver_sqlite 0.2.3 - sqlite MDB2 driver
• MDB2_Driver_pgsql 0.2.3 - pgsql MDB2 driver
• MDB2_Driver_mysqli 0.2.3 - mysqli MDB2 driver
• MDB2_Driver_mysql 0.2.3 - mysql MDB2 driver
• File_XSFP 0.1.0 - Package for Manipulating XSPF Playlists
• PEAR_PackageFileManager 1.6.0a5 - takes an existing package.xml file and updates it with a new filelist and changelog
• Validate_ISPN 0.6.0 - Validation class for ISPN (International Standard Product Numbers)
• XML_Feed_Parser 0.3.0beta - Providing a somewhat unified API for handling
• System_SharedMemory - common OO-style shared memory API

And for PECL, we had:

• operator 0.1 - Operator overloading for Objects

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!