Due to time constraints, mostly because of my Solar framework project, I haven't been able to pay as much attention to Savant as I think it deserves, so I made the hard decision to put it up for adoption. Lucky for the Savant community, Brett Bieber (aka Salty Beagle) picked up on that call right away.

Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP that does not compile templates into PHP. It uses PHP itself as the engine to keep things simple.

• Havard Eide - RIP PHP4
• Christian Wenz - PHP 4.4.9 Released (And Why You Should Be Worried If You Consider Installing It)
• Stefan Priebsch - PHP 4 is dead. An obituary
• Derick Rethans - RIP PHP4
• Sebastian Bergmann - KTHXBYE PHP 4
• Stefan Esser - PHP 4 - Requiescat in Pace
• Paul Jones - My Birthday Present From php.net
• Ken Guest - PHP 4 - this parrot is deceased!
• Christopher Jones - PHP 4 final-ever-last-terminal release is available
• Chris Shiflett - End of Life for PHP 4
• David Coallier - Small Goodbye to PHP4
• Gennady Feldman - The last day of PHP4
• Jacques Marneweck - So long and thank you for all the fish, PHP4
• Daniel Cousineau - End of an Era (Goodbye to PHP 4)
• Travis Swicegood - Today is the day!
• Lukas Smith - A short goodbye to 4.x
• Bill Gaffney - PHP 4 ends its life with final release 4.4.9
• ComputerWorld - PHP 4 is dead, long live PHP 4
• Evan Sims - PHP is dead, long live PHP! (finally.)
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney - Zend Framework 1.6.0 Preview, or, PHP 4 is Dead
• ZDNet - The Last PHP 4

If you aren't sure what they're talking about - the last day for official PHP 4 support is today, 08.08.08. Only PHP 5 will be supported from here on. It is highly recommended that you upgrade your applications to run on the latest PHP 5 version, 5.2.

Following the success of our two PHP seminars in London, we have decided to make it a tour and to visit other parts of the UK and Ireland as well. Next up are Leeds and Dublin - come and meet us in your city! Find out more about our events below.

The first is a talk on source control happening September 9th (as presented by Lorna Mitchell) and the second being a talk from Ivo Jansch in Dublin - "Enterprise PHP and Zend".

Check out the blog post for more information including how to register (do it before the Early Bird special ends and get a copy of CTO Ivo Jansch's book Guide to Enterprise PHP Development).

As the community grows, the EllisLab development team often does not have the time that we would like to interact with the community in various ways, but it's always been a key part of our success. So as the need arises, we have created this program to help keep the wheels greased so to speak, making sure that our forums, wiki, and bug tracker are handling the needs of the community and are properly moderated.

They have already brought in their first Chieftan, Michael Wales, a staff sergeant in the US Air Force.

The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento is a very popular eCommerce application that makes setting up an online shop quick and easy. It's well designed and has been nominates to several community spots like "Best Project for the Enterprise" and "Most Likely to Change the World".

Time 2.0 is focused on intranet collaboration and is a rewrite of the eGroupWare project (a collaboration suite allowing for instant access of any data from just about anywhere there's an internet connection).

You can cast your vote for these and other great community projects by logging in to SourceForge and selecting your favorites from the lists.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

This Packt book takes the reader through installing the Drupal software, configuring and theming, adding content and deploying a Web site. It is aimed at the end user who is looking to setup and customize Drupal's themes, but not actually write their own modules, which would be a topic for book on its own.

The review talks about some of the origins of the content management system, the contents of the book (use cases, introductions to the functionality, etc) and how to manage your site.

He talks about how several topics are used in his Redux library including hashing, salts, a method for getting/resetting a forgotten password and how to use database sessions to manage users logged in.

The Redux Authentication System is a "great CodeIgniter Auth library. It's light, easy to use and fully featured. It's a great choice for your new or existing project due to the power it gives to the developer".

This week, our Community Voice author is Elliot Haughin who discovered CodeIgniter in 2006 and instantly became a huge fan of its DRY-MVC-OO-MATYCSASA (More Acronyms Than You Can Shake A Stick At) - sleek, efficient, and (worryingly) sexy coding practices. He went on to produce a series of coding screencasts dedicated to exploring the power and simplicity of the CodeIgniter Framework.

His article, "CodeIgniter is a heck of a can opener", talks about how the framework "just works" when it comes to most tasks and some of the tasks he's done with it. Check out the audio that comes along with it too.

The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.