On the O'Reilly ONLamp blog Todd Ogasawara points out a few things that Windows users should watch out for with the upcoming PHP 5.3 release.

PHP 5.3.0 is only in its first alpha release. But, if you run PHP in Microsoft Windows, you should talk a look at the release notes for Windows binaries.

Among the changes are things like the drop of support for Windows versions less than Win2000, the changeover for compiling needs (VC6 versus the newer VC9) and that 64-bit binaries will be provided as well as the normal 32-bit (on a trial basis).

On the PHP::Impact blog Federico points out a new feature/update that the Propel team has made to help with performance - a change from Creole to the based PDO layer that PHP includes.

This change has a number of implications, particularly for those who are executing SQL directly. PDO's API is loosely similar to Creole's, so this change shouldn't require any major re-architecture.

New features that come along with this move you might have to upgrade for include the newer DSN format for build/runtime properties, the removal of the mysqli adapter, SPL autoload integration and a few API changes you'll have to look out for. You can find out more information on the Symfony framework's support for these changes on the sfPropelPlugin and DbFinderPlugin pages.

The PHP.net website has a note posted about the restructuring of the manual

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions.

Changes were made in the function reference and in the predefined variables and context options/parameters sections as well as information on upcoming features like namespaces, late static bindings and Phar (to be included in PHP 5.3). The manual is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

On the PHP::Impact blog, there's a new post talking about his conversion from Swift Mailer over to the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework.

I've recently switched from Swift Mailer to Zend_Mail and, to be honest, I'm loving it. Finally someone developed a lightweight, powerful and easy to use Mail component!

He includes an example or two showing a basic mailer script, one that uses a fluent interface, one sending an HTML email and two that show how to use a remote SMTP server.

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.

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.

Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.

I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.

Some of the updates include:

• One column design instead of the 2 column design
• Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts
• The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore
• Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts
• The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks!
• Patch uploading during ticket creation now works

He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.

Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.

Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.

He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.

In his opinion:

No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.

Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.

Andreas Gohr has posted about a script he's created to act as a simple replacement for the PHP/MySQL database tool phpMyAdmin - what he calls MySimple.php.

Kaddi needed to fix something in her employer's database today. Unfortunately she had FTP access only. So the database change had to be made through a PHP script. [...] I looked for a basic MySQL PHP interface but couldn't find one. So I quickly wrote it my self.

He has a screenshot of the app in action included and you can grab the code from his wiki.

Mike Lively has shared some of his thoughts on the late static binding functionality that will be in the upcoming PHP 5.3 - specifically the relationships of parents and children it has.

I won't rehash all of the arguments as you can quite easily find out my full thoughts by previous posts and on that mailing list thread. To put it simply I feel that somehow there needs to be a way to call methods in a parent class without losing the ability to reference back to the original called static.

He gives an example of what he's talking about (code) and, to help further his cause he's created three patches to make it work how he'd like.