Jacques Marneweck has a quick reminder for those trying to get the latest PEAR installer - you can always get it from CVS.

Quick note that the PEAR installer is missing (go-pear.org has expired and has been snapped up by some cybersquatters) and http://pear.php.net/go-pear renders a 404. So the current solution is to grab the go-pear install from CVS.

A quick curl call to a url on the cvs.php.net site (in the /pearweb directory) is all it takes to grab the latest. The page it's pulling is the source for the go-pear.php installer that can be run either from a web browser or from the command line (with a PHP binary).

Ken Guest has posted a review of yet another PHP-related book from APress publishing, "PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Second Edition)".

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.

Resulting from a conversation among developers at this year's PHP Quebec 2008 conference, a new event has been created to help test PHP against as many different configurations as it can be - TestFest.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event local UG are invited to join the TestFest. All it takes is a local organizer to spear head the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

The even will be announced sometime in March and its hope is to get as many people in the community involved to improve the language. There'll also be a raffle to give away 10 of the stuffed elePHPants as well as, for the ones who are "test worthy" and seem able to write up good tests on their own - commit CVS access to php.net as well as an official php.net account.

For more details on the event, check out this page on the (new) PHP.net wiki.

David has posted an article to the Expirmentalworks.net blog about a task that he and Johannes Schluter have finished up - importing the PHP CVS tree over into Git.

A few month ago Johannes Schluter and I started discussing about GIT and other decentralized version control systems. During our exploration of GIT we thought about importing the PHP CVS tree into git. A few weeks later and a lot of wasted cpu time, we finally managed to provide an inofficial GIT mirror of the PHP CVS repository. It's provided by Johannes Schluter and mirrored by me.

The post documents the path they followed - using git-cvsimport, parsecvs and a path they needed to make - to finally get the import working without any flaws. You can check out their unofficial repository here (it's updates twice a day from the live CVS).

Brian Moon has posted today about his editor fo choice for PHP work - jEdit and some of the benefits he thinks it has for other developers.

I keep trying all the latest and greatest editors out there. I fought with Eclipse and have tried the newer more PHP centric offerings built on Eclipse. I recently tried out Komodo Edit for a week. I had tried the Komodo IDE when it came out for Mac a while back. But, I just keep coming back to jEdit.

He's broken it down into two (well, really three) different sections - the likes and dislikes followed by things that he "doesn't care about but you might" (including Subversion and CVS support).

Christian Stocker briefly mentions a new addition he's made to the post-PHP5.3 branching of the main trunk of the PHP development - XSLT profiling.

After PHP 5.3 was branched (for making place for - among other new stuff - namespaces), it was finally time to put my XSLT profiling addition into the official PHP sources.

The addition allows you to check in on your XSLT translations and see which spots in it are taking the most time to parse. This can be a very valuable tool when trying to see into the "black box" that PHP has around XSLT transformations. PHP 5.2ers can get the same functionality with this patch too.

A new tutorial over on the HowTo Forge website today steps you through the process of getting a multisite Drupal installation set up on Ubuntu via CVS.

This howto shows you how to do a multi-site Drupal install on Ubuntu. It also covers how to layout your directories for ease of maintenance, and how to ensure that you can update Drupal easily from CVS.

Why go to all this bother? Why not just install Drupal using sudo aptitude install drupal? The answer is that as your website gets more popular, you're going to need to keep up to date with security patches, as well as manage all the custom modules you've installed.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• Configure DNS
• Install Packages
• Test Apache2/PHP Installation
• Test MySQL Installation
• Install Drupal Using CVS
• CVS Updates
• Create Additional Directories
• Create the Drupal Sites
• Configure Drupal

After long discussions and much opinion being thrown around, Andrei Zmievski points outintegration of namespaces into the upcoming PHP6 release.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have namespaces.

According to the post from Dmitry Stogov, the namespace code has been officially checked in to the builds - the posting from the php.zend-engine.cvs list shows all of the code that was added. The latest CVS snapshot should have the code for those that would like to test.

From the PEAR blog today comes a new post talking about the introduction of a much requested option when accessing the PEAR source code - SVN over CVS.

As part of the PEAR2 project we are making that happen. I'm happy to announce that we now have an SVN repo ready for testing. Web access at http://svn.pear.php.net with the SVN url being http://svn.pear.php.net/repo.

The access isn't quite available yet, but it will be as soon as they figure out how they want people to be able to access the parts of the PEAR2 source code. Keep an eye on the PEAR Blog for the latest.

Secunia has a new advisory posted concerning an issue discovered with PHP's SOAP extension's HTTP authentication mechanism:

The weakness is caused due to the use of an uninitialized variable within the function "make_http_soap_request()" of the SOAP extension when calling "php_rand_r()" to generate the nonce for the digest authentication, which may result in a weak and predictable nonce.

The issue is marked as "less critical" but should still be taken into consideration. The issue has been corrected in the latest CVS commit.