Q: Tell me some about the update/restructuring (like what prompted the change)

A: As of December 2008, php|architect will enter its sixth year of publication. Much has changed within the PHP community - and in our company'"since we launched our magazine, and we felt that it was time to ensure that our brand and our flagship product were up-to-date with the market they serve.

The process of change actually started earlier this summer, when we launched our new line of training courses - the first truly comprehensive training program designed specifically for PHP developers. Our brand identity and the magazine were the next logical targets - particularly when you consider how long they have been around and how many people they reach every month.

In addition, one problem that we have always had with the magazine has been its publication schedule - we initially created php|architect as a PDF-only publication, and since we've switched to the print format we've been struggling with the management of our publication timelines. The unfortunate reality is that postal services throughout the world sometimes take a *really* long time to deliver third-class mail and, historically. we have never done as good a job of taking that into account as we could'"something that we intend to fix with this relaunch.

Finally, our aim with php|architect has always been to create a resource capable of providing the PHP community with the educational tools and knowledge needed by professionals who work and operate in world-class, enterprise-level environments. We felt that our current price point and distribution strategy had moved away from this core goal, and that a major adjustment was needed to bring us back on track.

Q: What does this mean for current readers/subscribers?

A: A lot of good things! First of all, the cost of a subscription goes down to as low as $29.99 for twelve issues - and that includes both the print *and* the PDF versions of the magazine. Naturally, we're going to make good on all our current subscribers and extend their subscriptions based on the cost of the magazine when they signed up for it - thus, most people should see their remaining issue counts go up considerably at no extra cost, and new subscribers will be able to finally get access to the magazine at a very reasonable price.

In addition, our current subscribers (as well as the new ones!) will enjoy better delivery times, and all the advantages that come with the new format.

Q: What all is involved in the change? Are there any changes to the magazine(s)?

A: Much of the work that is involved in the relaunch of our activities will go on behind the scenes, but visitors to our websites will note lots of changes over the coming months'"starting with a minor redesign of our site to accommodate the new logo and brand identity, as well as the new pricing and subscription strategy for the magazine.

Starting with the January issue, we are targeting a 45-day window for shipment of the magazine'"meaning that the print copies of the January issue, for example, will be mailed out to subscribers around the beginning of December - thus ensuring more prompt delivery in everybody's mailboxes. In addition, the entire magazine will switch to full-colour printing throughout - thus providing a richer experience for our users and a more challenging and fun environment for us to develop our work in. We will continue to support the PDF version using our popular DRM-free distribution and personalization system, and try to synchronize the arrival of the print issue with the release of the PDF file as closely as possible.

Also for the first time, we are publishing our editorial calendar for all of 2009. This will help readers know what's coming, advertisers better plan their campaigns and authors draw inspiration for their writing activities.

Q: Will there be new things available immediately after the change?

Once the initial brand relaunch is complete, we are planning to re-engineer our site to provide a smoother shopping experience and better account management facilities. Since we relaunched our website almost a year ago, our web-based sales have more than doubled, and our back-end infrastructure has handled the growth without any problems. On the front-end side, however, we have done a considerable amount of research on the habits and needs of our customers and have discovered areas ripe for improvements that we couldn't even imagine before, and we will be redesigning some areas of our website to reflect the lessons we have learned.

In addition, we have some great promotions planned between here and New Year's - including a comeback for our greatly popular "Seven Days of Christmas" series of offers over the holidays. We skipped 7DOX last year, and our users gave us an earful for it, so we'll make sure to keep our priorities straight this time!

The new php|architect website has already been launched along with new training courses for the Zend Framework Certified Exam.

To subscribe to the new and improved php|architect magazine, visit their subscription page and signup. Find out more in this post on their site.

Learn the process of writing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) applications using native JavaScript code and PHP. This article introduces a few different frameworks and application program interfaces (APIs) that reduce the amount of code you need to write to achieve a complete Ajax-based Web application.

They (briefly) explain what Ajax is and the benefits of it before jumping right in to a sample page. They go for the "manual first" approach so developers know to make basic connections with the XMLHttpRequest object and handle the responses. They do mention some of the libraries offered that help with the connections too (like jQuery, Prototype and Dojo).

A new block has appeared today on top right corner of the php-gtk.eu pages, with three little flags : they show you can now navigate the site in one of these languages and, more importantly, automatically find the translated versions of all articles when they exist ... or contribute one yourself if you are logged in to the site.

Right now they offer English, French and German and they're still working on translating some parts of the UI of the site, but the articles and content should be translated over just fine.

A week after the release of the new plugin system, a lot of activity has taken place. More than 30 plugins were created, and 51 new releases were published on 27 different plugins. Based on the feedback I have received from the community, I have made some tweaks to the system.

These tweaks include a newly designed homepage, the inclusion of RSS feeds and a special URL to view the older wiki documentation for some plugins.

The second post describes more enhancements based on other feedback (on the previous post). Updates based on this information include an new "overview" field to describe the plugin, a download of the Markdown syntax to make the documentation conversion easier and a "stric mode" validation if you upload a PEAR package.

One frequently received suggestion is to redesign the site. As I explained before, changing the site design is not a big issue. The greatest challenge is to change the current design to another that pleases more users than the number of users the change may displease.

So, to keep things interesting, he's had a contest out of it with the winner, besides having their design applied to the site, will get their every own elePHPant and a prize of at least $1000 USD. The winning design will be the main one for the site, but it is possible that paying subscribers could have the ability to define their own.

More to come on the contest in the following weeks...

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

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.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format. The default format is still HTML but symfony supports several other formats out of the box as defined in the factories.yml file.

Using this system, it's easy to add new output formats by adding to the default layouts the framework comes equipped with. The Content-Type can be changed and layouts can be disabled as needed. This lets you make a custom definition just for use with the iPhone without a lot of hassle.

They also include an example of how to make one of these optimized layouts, including some iPhone "screenshots" of the resulting pages.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

So I attended the PEAR2 presentation and had a chance to bug the guys behind PEAR/PECL. There's definitely exciting stuff happening and they are pushing forward with many exciting ideas.

His suggestions include updates to documentation, crrection broken parts of the API and a "Package News" feature with the ability to leave comments on them.

He's also posted another suggestion - the ability of the authors of the project to provide other links besides the ones just for the project (external documentation, tutorials, etc)