I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.

There's just the one list currently (as hosted by omniti) but there's lots of subscribers. You can check out the signup page for more information on the list and get access to some of the archives of previous topics.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

A good bit of the content will be summarized from the Framework's mailing lists but will also include other articles/tutorials/updates on proposals/etc that are happening in that community.

• A post on the Stubbes blog by Frank Kleine and his discoveries of how the "use" keyword needs to be used in your applications
• A follow-up post from Frank as well correcting some of the problems in his first examples
• Some opinions from Richard Heyes on how useful they seem to him
• Brian Moon's comments on the level of traffic that the namespace discussion has been getting on the php.internals mailing list.

Right now there's so many ideas flying around about what namespaces should be and how they should be implemented that it'll be interesting to see which ideas finally come out on top.

The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.

They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.

We did http://ftalphaville.ft.com using Wordpress, and speaking as someone who's actually had to wade through pretty much the whole codebase, let me tell you it seriously sucks.

Their highlights include messing with the raw POST data to limit access, function calls chained eight long and comments like "This probably isn't needed anymore" all over the place.

All class and function names inside are automatically prefixed with namespace name. Inside namespace, local name always takes precedence over global name. It is possible to use the same namespace in several PHP files. The namespace declaration statement must be the very first statement in file.

The general idea is to provide an easy separation of functionality but to keep things accessible at any level (in scope, in parent scope, etc). He's included code in his mailing list post to illustrate how it would all work.

Several others in the PHP community have jumped on and are already talking about this new proposal:

• Evert Pot's post
• a blog entry from Richard Heyes proposing a namespace character
• a new post from the PHP 10.0 Blog on simplicity in namespaces
• this new post from Tony Bibbs
• some thoughts from Tobias Schlitt happily supporting the proposal
• this post from DynamicWebPages.de

As an outsider looking in, and being a realist instead of a fanboy, I'm finding it extremely hard to believe that PHP is going to continue its much hyped and proclaimed success in its current circumstances.

From his point of view there's a few things that, if the web was exposed to (like "tiffs that occur on PHP Internals") PHP's popularity would fade quite a bit.

As much as I hate to say this...You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs. I've been watching the Dev List over there and following it as well, and I don't see even half of the virtual crap-flinging that's almost become an everyday occurrence on the PHP Internals list.

Today's PHP security tip is short, sweet and easily actionable. It fits in well with the theme of the last one, to stay vigilant. Here's another resource for you to consider: If you are not already subscribed, you should subscribe to the Security Focus newsletter.

He links to their signup page and points out the most useful of their offerings - the BugTraq list.

BugTraq is a full disclosure moderated mailing list for the detailed discussion and announcement of computer security vulnerabilities: what they are, how to exploit them, and how to fix them.

I have updated the PHP RIA SDK to include new releases of AMFPHP (v 1.9 beta) as well as the latest WebORB for PHP release from the Midnight Coders (1.3.2). The free (as in speech) SDK is available now from the Adobe Flex Developer Center. You can join the mailing list to ask questions about the SDK, or if you want more information on connecting PHP and Flex together.

Besides the release, he includes a teaser about some "exciting work" being done in the world of PHP and Flex. Keep and eye out for this great news...