In Case You Missed It...The Week of April 3rd, 2006

Some of this year's more humorous April Fool's pranks included a resignation by Marco Tabini, a Jeremy Zawodny/Matt Cutts -Yahoo/Google Switch , Zend's Split from PHP, Google's Acquisition of PHPDN, SlashDot's super-cute "OMG!! Ponies!!" pepto-pink site redesign, and Microsoft's purchase of OpenOffice.org. Incidentally, you can find a pretty comprehensive list of major April Fool's jokes at Wikipedia.

Congrats go out to MySQL (Best Database), Apache (Best Webserver), Zend (Best Debugger, Encoder and Development Environment), IonCube (Best Accelerator), phpMyAdmin (Best PHP Tool), and PHP Project (Best Groupware) for their Reader's Choice awards. For more info, you can visit PHPMagazin's site.

The Codewalkers site has announced that it is raffling off 5 copies of this book written by Robert Richards and published by Apress. They will be announcing the winners on April 7. No purchase necessary, just complete an entry form at the Codewalkers site. To enter and to get all the details, go to http://codewalkers.com/raffle.php.

In a note from their website, we see that the brains behind the International PHP Conference, which was to be held in Amsterdam has been cancelled, primarily because of some overlap of sessions between this conference and ApacheCon Europe (also sponsored by Software & Support Verlag). The unofficial word is that the World Cup also had something to do with it, but that remains to be seen. The Fall International PHP Conference will prove to be one of the biggest PHP related conferences around, so make sure to mark your calendars.

Zend announces its second annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo- to be held on October 29-November 2, 2006 in San Jose, CA. They have also announced a CFP that will be open until June 15th so you have plenty of time to get your thoughts together and submit something cool. For more information on where and how to submit your proposal, go to the Zend Developer Zone.

In a recent blog post, Greg Beaver gives us a definitive guide to setting up a PEAR channel with the most updated Chiara_PEAR_Server package. You will need 5.0.3 or higher, and PEAR 1.4.3 or higher. Greg goes into detail about what else you will need, acquiring the package, configuring it, creating a frontend for your users, creating a new package and adding users, uploading a release and finally remote testing of the server. Thanks for the helpful info, Greg!

This latest release of the PEAR base installer is a "critical bugfix release" so you are encouraged to upgrade as soon as you can. For more info and to download, go to http://pear.php.net/package/PEAR/download.

Although it's not been officially announced yet, we've been able to get some insider's information from some blogs, most notably the following presentations have been accepted:

• Chris Shiflett/Geoffrey Young will be giving a tutorial on PHP Testing
• David Sklar will be speaking on interdependencies in your web apps
• Adam Trachtenberg will be speaking on PHP5's ext/soap extension.

php|architect has announced that there are no more registrations available for purchase for the conference scheduled for April 25-28, 2006 in Orlando. I checked on eBay, but alas there were none to be found. For anyone who didn't get their registration in time, Marcus Whitney will be hosting a special Pro-PHP Podcast after the event.

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

• Gtk2_IndexedComboBox - Indexed Gtk2 combo box similar to the HTML select box.
• Gtk2_FileDrop - Make Gtk widgets accept file drops
• PEAR_PackageUpdate_Gtk2 - A PHP-GTK 2 front end for PEAR_PackageUpdate
• PEAR_PackageUpdate - A simple way to update packages at run time.
• Net_Geo - Geographical locations based on Internet address
• PEAR - PEAR Base System
• Net_Growl - Send notifications to Growl from PHP on MACOSX
• Image_Puzzle - Generates puzzle pieces from image file
• PHP_Beautifier - Beautifier for Php
• Date_Holidays - Driver based class to calculate holidays
• PEAR_RemoteInstaller - PEAR Remote installation plugin through FTP

And for PECL, we had:

• pecl_http - Extended HTTP Support
• zip - A zip management extension

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!