The community has responded to the fact that PHP4 is officially "dead" with a few posts to their blogs. Here's the list so far:

• 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.

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention wraps up today but some of the PHPers out there have already made some blog posts and have shared their slides from the event. Here's the list so far:

• Luke Welling - SNAP - PHP Taint Tool
• Ed Finkler - Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• Laura Thomson - Write Beautiful Code
• Wez Furlong - Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP
• Theo Schlossnagle - Full-stack Introspection Crash Course
• Ben Ramsey - Give Your Site a Boot With Memcache, OSCON 2008: Day One
• Mike Naberezny - Integration Testing PHP Applications & Supervisor as a Platform
• John Coggeshall - Top 10 Scalability Mistakes
• Andrei Zmievsky - intl me this, intl me that
• Chris Shiflett - OSCON Wrapup
• Jan Lehnardt - OSCON 2008 (wrapup)

Keep an eye out here for more slides and blog posts as they come out.

In this new post, Chris Hartjes takes a look at something that is one of the banes of most programmers' existence - documentation. In it he wonders what should really be considered documentation and the importance of it.

As a committed user of open source technologies, the difference between me using something and not using something is the documentation. Is there documentation for it? Is it easy to find? Does it answer my questions? Is there someone I can call an idiot if I disagree with the level of documentation? These are all very important questions.

He uses the illustration of the documentation of the CakePHP framework that's helpful, but only really after you learn how to use the framework in the first place. He mentions people on both sides of the fence - those that love the framework and love the documentation and those that moved on to something simpler because they just couldn't get it.

He also mentions the variety of sources that can provide "documentation" for the framework when you're getting a bit stuck - everything from blogs to The Bakery to a different sort of documentation, unit test.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post full of links to some great add-ons for the popular WordPress blogging software to help make your site into more of a community.

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here's fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

Some of the packages they link to include Ajaxd WordPress, Profiles, Quick SMS, Invite Friends and SezWho.

The PHPClasses.org website has posted a new book review about the Packt Publishing offering "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites" (book by David Mercer, review by Zoltan Hunt).

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.

Matthew Turland has said goodbye to Wordpress and hello to Habari - a "next-generation free software blogging platform". He also includes one of the more helpful tips for those thinking on doing the same:

So after eventually getting fed up with WordPress, especially after the WYSIWYG editor disappeared in the 2.3.3 update, I finally decided to bite the bullet and migrate my blog over to Habari. Once I'd been through the process, I thought I'd write a short blog entry about the experience.

The two tips he mentions are about exporting the old content (made simple from the WordPress admin interface) and making Habari support his WordPress URL scheme (so as not to loose links to any content out there). He found this to help on that front.

Padraic Brady has posted the second addendum to his series on creating a blogging application with the Zend Framework. It covers a revised blog design and the creation of a date format view helper.

In the second of my Addendum posts which revise previous entries either for missing functionality, progressive changes and enhancements, or reader comments, I revise the design and styling of the blog application. There's not a lot to discuss in this entry since the majority of changes are to the HTML and CSS of the blog.

He includes the phtml template files for the updates to the blog's layout along with the code for the new view helper (and tips on making them global and optimizing them).

Padraic Brady has posted a new entry in his series on developing blogging software with the Zend Framework today. It's no new content, but it is a contained version of a previous part (part 9) marked up in Docbook and pushed out into a PDF.

After my playtime with Docbook and PDF generation, I decided to make a sample PDF of the current Part 9 of the tutorial series. Your comments as to layout, style, portability and other facets that make a PDF worth downloading are very welcome. Eventually the whole series will be available in this format as well as HTML.

He's using Docbook 5, Docbook XSL and Apache FOP to generate the files. Syntax highlighting is done through Phing.

One of the more popular PHP community sites out there, PHPFreaks, has launched the completely reworked version of their site:

Recently there have been many changes to PHP Freaks. A significant change is the total rewrite and redesign of the main site. The old one was taken down after vulnerabilities were found in the source code. For the last couple of months we have been working on making what you are currently looking at now. The release has been postponed a couple of times, but people have been patiently waiting for the site.

They've added a blog to the mix (which this post is a part of) to help keep visitors up to date on the site's happenings and various other news from the admins. If you find a bug, let them know, otherwise - enjoy the new site and check out all of the same great content.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico has written up a bit of a "history of PHP applications" since 1998 that have changed the community (and the online world) by being released.

From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date.

Among those on the list are things like SquirrelMail (1999), phpBB (2000), Drupal (2001) and WordPress (2003). More lately things like frameworks and content management systems have been popular and are being developed with more structure and better standards than some of their predecessors.