The CodeIgniter blog has posted another community spotlight by one of its members - this time it's Mathew Davies (author of the Redux Auth library) talking about hashing.

He talks about how several topics are used in his Redux library including hashing, salts, a method for getting/resetting a forgotten password and how to use database sessions to manage users logged in.

The Redux Authentication System is a "great CodeIgniter Auth library. It's light, easy to use and fully featured. It's a great choice for your new or existing project due to the power it gives to the developer".

The CodeIgniter blog has spotlighted another member of their community in a recent post - Elliot Haughin.

This week, our Community Voice author is Elliot Haughin who discovered CodeIgniter in 2006 and instantly became a huge fan of its DRY-MVC-OO-MATYCSASA (More Acronyms Than You Can Shake A Stick At) - sleek, efficient, and (worryingly) sexy coding practices. He went on to produce a series of coding screencasts dedicated to exploring the power and simplicity of the CodeIgniter Framework.

His article, "CodeIgniter is a heck of a can opener", talks about how the framework "just works" when it comes to most tasks and some of the tasks he's done with it. Check out the audio that comes along with it too.

According to this post on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, Microsoft has released a new five page PDF file titled "PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance" discussing the relationship between the software giant and the language over recent years.

The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.

In a recent post to his blog, Lukas Smith talks about some of the recent advancements and ideas surrounding his emPHPower PHP evangelism organization (in particular a discussion at this year's International PHP Conference.

The fact of the matter is that today they [Zend] are stuck with a job they never asked to take over: They are the only PHP evangelism organization. So if you want to get some material on how to "sell" PHP to your Java loving IT department, Zend is the only real option to turn to. So we have to thank them for filling this void for now.

emPHPower is looking to replace that with a more diverse range of developers and companies that can provide details on a wide variety of PHP-related topics (including using PHP in the enterprise and the best open source solutions for different needs). He's looking to work with more of the regionally-focused PHP sites (user groups?) to help get things up and running in the beginning and then branching out to "the masses", possibly via other means.

Hasin Hayder has posted part two of his series on making a FriendFeed clone in PHP (here's part one).

Following the first installment in this series, here is the second part. In this part I will focus mainly on Bookmarking and News services supported by FriendFeed .

He points out some of the major bookmarking sites and the URLs for their interfaces for their users (like del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon and news services like digg and reddit).

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.

In the wake of this year's php|tek conference, Marco Tabini has unveiled his secrets to the "master conference evil plan" that he and the php|architect crew have been putting in to action for their conferences:

For the past four years, I have put a lot of work into executing a strategic plan that is tangentially connected with our conferences. [...] Instead [of trying to force interaction], I decided to try and slowly steer things in a direction that would have made our conferences closer to a family reunion than a dry business meetup.

He mentions the steps in his "evil plan" (for conference domination?) - community participation, setting the right atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, the oh-so-secret choosing of the speakers and their leadership by example through participation with the speakers and other conference goers.

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.

The latest episode of the php|architect P3 podcast has been posted today - the Newscast for May 15th, 2008.

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

• php|tek 2008 (and a possible Ramblecast)
• The updated SPL Data structures
• Multi Directory dll loading
• TestFest 2008
• XDebug in Debian

To get the show you can either download the mp3 directly or you can add their feed to your reader of choice and get the latest episodes hand delivered.

Several new tutorials, components, news and helpers have been posted to The Bakery, the CakePHP community site lately. Here's a sampling:

• CakePHP on IIS6 with FastCGI, SQL Server 2005, and ISAPI_Rewrite
• Filter Out Unnecessary Recursive Relationships
• Twitter Component
• Chartable Behavior
• Increment Behavior
• markItUp! jQuery universal markup editor Helper
• The CakePHP Blog Tutorial with SMARTY
• Vendor Branching
• CakePHP 1.2 stable coming soon

Check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related goodness.