With the successful relaunch of the PHPFreaks.com website recently, Daniel Egeberg wanted to share a little glimpse behind the work that it took to get to that place. In this new blog entry, he talks about the technology, code and design aspects they worked through.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

Kore Nordmann has posted a new article series (to the "Articles" section of his site) with six different pieces talking about different aspects of image creation with PHP:

• Image creation with PHP - Image Tools
• Image creation with PHP - Text rendering
• Image creation with PHP - Integrating bitmaps
• Image creation with PHP - Gradient rendering
• Image creation with PHP - A first shape
• Image creation with PHP - Formats & Libraries

Each of them can be read separately, but they're all part of a series and make more sense when read together.

The Hardened-PHP project has just released another advisory about core PHP functionality, specifically in the unserialize function when dealing with arrays.

The PHP 5 branch of the PHP source code lacks the protection against possible integer overflows inside ecalloc() that is present in the PHP 4 branch and also for several years part of our Hardening-Patch and our new Suhosin-Patch.

It was discovered that such an integer overflow can be triggered when user input is passed to the unserialize() function.

You can get the full details from this advisory release including a recommendation to patch the installation until it is corrected in the current distribution.

DevShed kicks off another three-parts series today with part one of a look at working with builder objects in PHP5.

In this article, the first of a three-part series, you will be introduced to the basics of creating directors and builder objects with PHP 5. As usual, there will be copious examples to help you quickly start using the builder pattern in your own PHP projects.

Well, to put things in a simple perspective, when the builder pattern is applied, two objects are put into action to create a third one. First, these two objects create a director; as its name suggests, the director controls all aspects of the creation process and determines what pieces and modifications will be introduced into the target object. Finally, a builder is tasked with constructing the third object in question, in accordance with particular specifications. Sounds fairly simple, doesn't it?

They start with a look at starting with the Builder pattern, building a basic XML document to provide the structure for the target object. From that information, they show how to create the object and give a simple class to help direct that object along.