Stefan Mischook has made his entire video series detailing the creation of a simple shopping cart in PHP available for download:

After teasing you guys for a week or so, I've released the entire video tutorial course on building a PHP based shopping cart. There is a small charge ($19.99) to download the entire course, but it is more than worth it since you get 140 minutes of top notch nerd training...and we include the source code too.

The course walks you through the creation of the cart - what technology you'll need, building the simple catalog page, making the "add to cart" page, as well as the cart itself (including calculating the costs and shipping costs). It also includes an integration method for hooking into PayPal's IPN setup to change the customer for the goods.

Rich Zygler asks in one of his recent blog posts, if Microsoft purchasing a 240 million dollar chunk of Facebook is a good thing for the language it's written in - PHP.

Microsoft is buying a piece of Facebook. What do we all think this means for PHP since Facebook is one of the "web 2.0" leaders built on PHP? The way I see it, [there] are [six] options.

Among the possible outcomes he lists are things like Microsoft rewriting the site, Facebook continues as it is or (next to impossible) Microsoft sees the error of its ways and fully embraces open source.

Damien Seguy and company have developed a brand new plush toy based around the PHP elephant idea set out by Vincent Pontier a while back:

The elephant is a community project. It was started as a crazy idea that I used to suggest to a number of people. I managed to draw a lot of happy smile, but I suspect that half this happiness was due to sheer craziness of the project. [...] Of course, it was impossible to prototype this mascot without involving Vincent Pontier. The rest is history. We started prototyping, and within a month, we got this excellent looking plush toy (we'll tell you about the manufacturer once we get the full load of them).

Check out the post on Nexen.net for lots of product shots (including the obligatory cute kid shot) and details on how it was developed and the answer to the important question - where you can get your hands on one.

Some groups have already ordered a large number of them for themselves and their members, but an online shop is coming soon to Nexen.net where you can pick up your own fuzzy bit of PHPness.

Christian Wenz has posted this new item on his blog today with a report relating to the Oracle/Zend rumors that have been floating around.

Well, the rumors (that also made it into blogosphere, including Toby's post) obviously could not be ignored by Zend any longer. Therefore, the German division of Zend just sent out an email to a couple of people officially stating that Zend is currently not negotiating a sale to Oracle.

I suppose only time will tell on the deal, but it seems for now that the sale is not going to happen (and that there never was a sale in talks at all).