Rob Allen has a new post to his blog today that looks at database migrations in Zend Framework applications. He introduces a component of his own - Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager - to handle the migrations.

It is intended that any time you want to make a change to your database schema (add columns, tables, indexes, etc), then you create a new migration file. [...] The migration file contains a class that extends Akrabat_Db_Schema_AbstractChange and must contain two methods: up() and down(). It follows that up() is called when implementing the changes in this migration and down() is called to put the database back where it was if the change is backed out.

He includes an example of a migration file, one that defines the "up" method to create a table and the "down" to remove it. The Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager is what your script would interface with by calling the "updateTo" method and change your database's structure. It can even hook into Zend_Tool to make it command-line friendly.

The PHP Women have officially announced the winners of their "Best Practices" article contest:

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we've been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our "Best Practices" section. We've been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!

The winners are Akrabat for his look at recursion and gerard for his article on CLI tips and tricks. They both have won their own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and a chance to have their article published on the magazine's site.