Today on the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen reminds the community about a "one-stop resource" that they can use to keep up to date on some of the latest happenings with the PHP language, the PHP.net wiki.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

On the O'Reilly OnLAMP.com site today, there's a new article with a few tips on making the tag clouds on your site successful from Jim Bumgardner, the author of Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP.

Tag clouds can be used effectively, and provide real value to a web site, or they can be tacked on as an afterthought, simply because they look cool, or to make the site appear similar to other, better web sites that offer them. Ultimately, you need to keep in mind their dual function, both as a graph of current activity, and as a navigation aid. Here are some design and implementation tips.

His list includes:

• Choose the right language
• Frequency sorting
• Avoid Random Mappings
• Try Different Maps

Each item has a brief explaination of what its about, and some include examples of what to do/what not to do.

On the IBM developerWorks blog today, there's this look at the differences between PHP and Windows when it comes to the working directory you're grabbing in your script.

I recently investigated the values of the PHP and Windows working directory for a variety of environments. My reason for doing so was that I could never quite understand how relative pathnames were resolved, and if you want to write code that will run, for example, both under Zend Studio, from the command line, and Apache, it matters. And it is not surprising that I never understood it either - every environment is different.

He ran five tests to show each of the environments that a PHP script might be running in and what two methods return - PHP's getcwd and Windows' getcwd in direct.h). There are some similarities between the output of the two, but there's enough difference to be worrysome for any programmer making scripts for both. He also gives a specific example of a situation he was in involving incorrect paths and libxml2 and the difficulties that were found there.

In this brief entry on the ThinkPHP blog (by bjoern), it seems that there's more than just talk about the Zend/Oracle deal.

While reading the tecosystems blog, I stumbled over Steven's entry "The Oracle M&A Q&A: JBoss, Sleepycat and Zend". It seems that at least Oracle's interest in Zend is true: "[...] and in one panel yesterday Zend's Doron Gerstel did little to deny the Oracle interest". Also, it seems that JBoss has been acquired for $485 Mio. by Oracle.

the Q&A mentions that Zend would fit in with their plans as an "in" to the PHP community and a way of increasing their growth in the database markets.