On the PHPClasses.org site Manuel Lemos has posted the latest episode of the "Lately in PHP" podcast series. This episode, number 36, talks about the upcoming release of PHP 5.5 and looks forward to 5.6.

The PHP 5.5.0 final release is about to happen. After about 16 months of development PHP 5.5 is bringing even more maturity to the PHP language, which by Google numbers is present in 75% of the Web sites. [...] hey also discussed some new features proposed for PHP 5.6 like incremental decoding of large JSON data streams and overloading arithmetic operators for arbitrary precision math. They also debated the meaning of Google finally adding support to PHP in their cloud hosting platform Google AppEngine. Also in this episode it was discussed an article about good practices to quickly detect and fix PHP code bugs that only show up in production environments.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading it directly or you can watch the video of the live recording on YouTube.

On the PHPClasses.org blog they've posted the latest "Lately In PHP" Podcast - Episode #28, "PHP 5.5 Release Date and Plans":

PHP 5.5 release is already being planned. The release manager was picked, the new features are decided and the release date is estimated. This one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in episode 28 of the Lately in PHP podcast. They also discussed the interpretation from VentureBeat that Zend is working on mobile version of PHP, using abstract symbol tables to optimize PHP further, and creating classes that provide APIs that are simpler for the users.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

In this new post to his site Gonzalo Ayuso introduces you to one of the more powerful parts of the PHP language - the DateTime object.

I've seen a lot of newbies (and not newbies) having problems handling dates in PHP (and even with SQL and another languages). When I see someone having problems with dates, I always ask the same question. I type in a text editor "27/11/2012″ and I ask him: What is it? If your answer is "This is a date" you should continue reading the post.

He talks about how the DateTime functionality replaces (much more effectively) some of the older date handling methods in PHP. He includes a few examples comparing it to date and showing how it can be used to compare dates. He includes a "Dummy" class he mocked up to show how you could work with DateTime to get/set formatted dates, set the format to use and get the current format. As always, he also provides tests for the code as well.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as to what DateTime can do, so I'd suggest checking out the manual page for it to see the full list of features.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial by Sean Hudgston about working with dates and times via the PHP date functions and how they cooperate with dates/times from a MySQL database.

When working in any programming language, dealing with dates and time is often a trivial and simple task. That is, until time zones have to be supported. Fortunately, PHP has one of the most potent set of date/time tools that help you deal with all sorts of time-related issues: Unix timestamps, formatting dates for human consumption, displaying times with time zones, the difference between now and the second Tuesday of next month, etc. In this article I'll introduce you to the basics of PHP's time functions (time(), mktime(), and date()) and their object-oriented counterparts, and then take a look at MySQL dates and show you how to make them play nicely with PHP.

His examples include how to get the current Unix time, formatting dates/times, making timestamps and working with the more powerful DateTime objects. On the MySQL front, he shows the result of a normal date select, one using the "unix_timestamp" function and how to shift the result based on the user's timezone.

Brian Moon has a reminder about date handling in PHP - days are not always 86400 seconds long, sometimes there's "leap seconds" included too. Thankfully, there's easy ways around it:

The problem with this is that it assume that there are only 86400 seconds in every day. There are in fact not. On days when the clocks change for daylight savings time, there are either 1 hour more than that or 1 hour less than that. In addition, there are also leap seconds put into our time system to keep us in line with the sun. There is one this year, 2012, on June 30th in fact. Since they don't happen with the regularity that daylight savings time does, it may be easy to forget those. Luckily, for this problem, the solution is the same.

His first solution involves letting strtotime do the work for him, internally calculating the leap seconds or any other issue that might come up. As an alternate solution, he also mentions "doing your math at noon" - this gives you enough leeway to make the offset leap seconds could cause a much smaller risk.

On PHPClasses.org today they've released their latest episode of their "Lately In PHP" podcast - episode #17. In this new episode Manuel and Ernani talk about PHP-GTK in a web browser and the proposed PHP 5.4 release date.

PHP 5.4 beta 2 was just released, so the final version of 5.4.0 is coming soon. Many PHP Developers want to know when it will be the final PHP 5.4 release date. Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert talk about this and other interesting PHP related topics in episode 17 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the full mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and past episodes (including ones about MODX and PHPFog).

On the WebInOne blog there's a post about doing some date validation in CodeIgniter 2 forms using the "set_validation" method.

I wrote a tutorial here about the CI date. At that post I used the HTML <select> for the input of date. Sometime our client can want to use text box for the date input. We need the validation for this date. I have found this code from here. It is for CI 1.7.* and PHP 5.2.*. So I change some code for the CI 2.0.* and PHP 5.3.*.

There's some code snippets included in the post showing how to use it in the form (HTML), setting the validation on the form object (for US and UK validation) and the actual code of the updated custom Validation class.

Slawek Lukasiewicz has a new post today about working with dates and times in PHP on a more object-oriented fashion than in the more traditionally procedural way of just calling PHP date/time functions on the string values.

Date and time manipulation in PHP is mostly connected with functions like: date, time or strtotime. They can be sufficient, but if we want to deal with dates like with objects - we can use DateTime class. DateTime class is not only straightforward wrapper for standard functions, it has a lot of additional features - for example timezones.

He shows how to use the DateTime functionality to return an object you can call several different methods on. He gives examples of the formatting call, comparing one DateTime object to another, how to update the date after the object's created, calculating the difference between two dates and iterating through a certain time period.

On the XpertDeveloper.com site there's a post reminding you of an date could cause all sorts of problems with your PHP application - the effects of the Y2K38 bug.

Y2K38, or the Unix Millennium Bug, affects PHP and many other languages and systems which use a signed 32-bit integer to signify dates as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. The furthest date which can be stored is 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Beyond that, the left-most bit is set and the integer becomes a negative decimal number or a time prior to the epoch.

If you're worried about your application's support for date and time handling, there's a pretty simple fix - replace your current handling with the DateTime functionality. This handles them correctly.

James Cohen has a new post to his blog today looking at some of the built-in functionality that PHP has to work with dates and times including simple things like strtotime and the DateTime feature.

A lot of people ask questions relating to date and time in PHP. Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions and common mistakes.

He covers the differences between working with dates in strtotime, worrying about timezone settings and compares the strtotime/DateTime methods for formatting and returning dates, modifying dates, converting between timezones as well as finding the difference between two timezones.