Andi Gutmans has some great news for Ubuntu users - the Zend Framework will be included in a future version of the linux distribution (Hardy Heron, Ubntu 8).

We are very proud to be an integral part of the Ubuntu distribution going forward. This is an important step towards making Zend Framework accessible to a broader audience and by working closely with the MOTUs we are able to ensure a positive end-user experience.

Andi also points out some of the stats from the framework's life so far: 4M downloads of Zend Framework, 500K of them unique and only growing stronger.

In this new advisory posted on the Secunia.com site today, there's an announcement of a highly critical update for Ubuntu users for their PHP distributions.

Ubuntu has issued an update for php. This fixes some vulnerabilities, where some have unknown impacts and others can be exploited by malicious users to bypass certain security restrictions and potentially by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system.

Check out the posting to grab the links for the packages for the various distributions (and for the different version numbers of Ubuntu). As this issue is marked as "highly critical" it's recommended that you update your installation as soon as possible.

Damien Seguy (maintainer of the French PHP site, Nexen.net) has passed along two new helpful links for those checking out the site - one specifically for the English-speaking audience out there and the other an effort to consolidate the distributions out there.

Two pieces of news for you - I have set up a page which collect all English articles on Nexen.net. http://www.nexen.net/the_english_speaking_nexen.net.php That's not much, but it will help non-French speaking readers.

I collected the list of PHP and MySQL distributions. Nowadays, there are way too many sources for those too technologies to be downloaded from: official version, snaps, installers, source, binaries, source control...So I made a list of them, and they are now in one place to be found.

The "one place" is this page on Nexen.net gives the latest on PHP, MySQL, and the packages that combine them for an easier install.

There's a tutorial over on mpwebwizard.com that's been updated and talks about using a mirror to handle hits from a popular website (like digg or slashdot).

caching services such as coral content distribution network provide an alternative for when your site goes down, but why wait until it gets to that stage? why not just send all your hits from high-end websites to the coral cache version? well, there isn't a good reason not to, so i'll show you how to do it automatically.

He provides the simple script that looks for certain sites in the "HTTP_REFERER" value of incoming calls and pushes them off to the cached location with a header() redirect. The whole thing is only 12 lines, not counting the $sites array.

Via The system is being developed by the several groups, but they opted to go with a PHP/SQL database solution over any of their software ultimately.

Zend has issued a press release today announcing their split from the PHP group in order to pursue their own branch of the popular web development language.

Andi Gutmans, Co-founder and Vice President of Zend, is quoted as saying: It's about time we finally made the move. All of those people whining constantly about 'PHP is broken here - make it better' and 'Why can't you fix my favorite function so it works better?' Frankly, we at Zend are tired of it, and we're not gonna take it anymore.

Neither Zeev Suraski or Marc Andreessen could be reached for comment on this branch, but sources say that the entire company is behind this move. Branching off to create their own "Zend PHP" allows them to integrate their recently released (preview version) of Framework more closely and give it the power it needs to surpass the original PHP distribution.

Tobias Schlitt has some comments to share after taking a look at the way the Gentoo project is handling its PHP installation (through Portage).

I love portage above everything else, believe me, but the PHP package sucks. Although it compiles really well and is very easy to configure (hey, thanks Sebastian and all the other maintainers!), Gentoo seems to have an issue with enabling certain compiling options by default. If you don't set any of the USE flags (configuration options for compiling packages through Portage) for PHP, it will simply compile with --disable-all and is completly unusable.

He discovered this when he was working through an install to test something for eZ components and had to add in flags to the system just to get anything he could use. HE wonders why the most basic flags arean't included just by default, making for a much easier time for most users just needing something to get started with.