The tilllate.com blog has a new post about a milestone in their development process - the removal of two old legacy components with ones from the Zend Framework making it running 100% on the Framework code.

The gallery and the user registration. The whole site tilllate.com is now running on Trevi, our extension of Zend Framework. With a reach of 2.5 million unique clients a month, tilllate.com is one of the world's biggest installation of Zend Framework.

They talk about the two upgraded parts of their older system - the move up to the Zend_Db database abstraction layer and a change to use memoization in the Zend_Date and Zend_Config components.

Andrei Zmievski has posted an encouraging note on his blog about the progress of PHP6 concerning the number of functions that have been correctly converted to support Unicode.

Well, PHP boys and girls, this feels like quite a milestone: 50% of the 3084 functions that are bundled with PHP 6 have been upgraded to support and work safely with Unicode.

He includes a small chart beside the post as well showing where things are currently at like the safe vs unsafe functions.

Sara Golemon brings us some news from the front about PHP6 in her latest blog entry today.

While everyone else has been busily gearing up for the release of PHP 5.2 and the new features that are going to come with it, Andrei and his small band of merry babelonians (yours truly included) have been making inroads on preparing PHP6 for a preview release. In the past week we've managed to roughly double the number of builtin functions (those which are part of the main distribution) that have been reviewed for unicode safety, either flagging them as good or upgrading their functionality

She also talks about what kinds of functions this entailed and how far along they are total (around 22%). She also encourages anyone that wants to get involved to help to jump right in.

Following up on some of his previous posts to the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks has posted this quick guide with some "hot UTF-8 tips" to share with the community.

As a result of all the noise about UTF-8, got an email from Marek Gayer with some very smart tips on handling UTF-8. What follows is a discussion illustrating what happens when you get obsessed with performance and optimizations (be warned - may be boring, depending on your perspective).

He talks mainly about using the native PHP functionality to avoid the mbstring issues that could arise by restricting locale behavior and using a fast case conversion function to handle strings correctly. The other tip involves delivery methods to those not able to recieve UTF-8 formatted content - checking their character set and responding accordingly.