Johannes Schluter has posted about the release of the latest Release Candidate of the PHP 5.3.x series - PHP 5.3.1RC2.

Just a quick heads-up: After quite some time from RC1 PHP 5.3.1RC2 has finally been packaged and released. The PHP bug tracker is welcoming reports about issues, I also welcome positive feedback.

Here's the links to the downloads: tar.bz2, tar.gz and Windows binaries.

On the DotVoid.com blog Danne shares a quick tip on forcing downloads over HTTPS to Internet Explorer (which, of course, has to be difficult about it).

The problem is that Internet Explorer does not handle file dowloads without caching over https very well. Or at all. According to knowledge articles on Microsofts website the problem occurs when having one or two of the http headers. [...] Previously I have have just omitted the http header "Pragma: nocache" for IE but it seems it does not always help.

So the fix is relatively simple - rely on the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] value to tell if it's an IR browser or not. If it is, "Pragma: cache" works. If not, stick with "Pragma: no-cache".

This new tutorial from NETTUTS.com takes a look at creating an online file storage system - uploading files and having them linked for download.

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to create an online file storage system with PHP. You will learn how to upload files with PHP and list them by scanning the "uploads" folder.

You can download the source to get started right away or you can work through their tutorial - complete with code snippets and screenshots - to build out this simple system. They also throw in a little Javascript (jQuery) to show/hide files based on which of the file types you select.

In his recent blog entry Oren Solomianik takes a look at using the zdbform software (a web-based, simple database administration tool) he's put together using the Zend Framework.

If you're looking for a simple tool that uses Zend Framework's robust database classes (such as Zend_Db and Zend_Db_Table), you can check out zdbform. It's a short yet effective library that let's you perform simple administration tasks on your database, with minimal coding. It's not a full blown phpMyAdmin, but it's a simple way to view, edit and add your tables rows on a web interface.

He shows how you can use it in a script - from the front controller to the input forms - and some of the changes he needed to make in the form class itself to handle a few of the bit more tricky parts.

In this new post to his blog Jim Plush looks at a design pattern that could help you and your application become less reliant on external content sources and increase your user satisfaction for it.

No one has a 100% SLA. This means that more than ever you need to code defensively to prevent external resources from tarnishing the user experience of your site. This is where the Circuit Breaker Stability Pattern comes into play (From the book "Release It").

The concept behind the breaker is easy - too many failures from the resource and the script to grab the content is "broken" and no request is made until the connection check signals the "all clear". He includes a class and a walk through to show how it might work in a connection to a script on a test server. The CircuitBreaker class has enough smarts to be able to tell if the given resource can be fetched from (the circuit is closed) or not.

The eZ systems group has released the latest edition of their PHP component system - eZ components version 2008.2.2.

This bug fix release addresses a few minor issues in the following components: Archive, Database, Document, Graph, Mail, PersistentObject, Search, Workflow and WorkflowDatabaseTiein. For details see the full change log.

eZ Components is an enterprise ready general purpose PHP components library used independently or together for PHP application development. With eZ Components, developers do not have to reinvent the wheel, instead they can concentrate on solving customer-specific needs.

You can either install/update through the project's pear channel or it can be downloaded directly from the site.

Joakim Nygard has come up with a debug bar similar to ones found in other frameworks for the Zend Framework - the Scienta ZF debug bar.

The Scienta ZF Debug Bar is a plugin for the Zend Framework for PHP5. It provides useful debug information displayed in a small bar at the bottom of every page. Time spent, memory usage and number of database queries are presented at a glance. Additionally, included files, a listing of available view variables and the complete SQL command of all queries are shown in separate panels (shown configured with 2 database adapters):

You can check out an example setup here [png] and get the full installation instructions and latest downloads from the project's page.

Tony Bibbs has made a release of an MVC framework that's been a few years of his development time in the making - MVCnPHP.

I will start this blog entry by saying I like Zend Framework. I really do. However, the part of ZF I don't use is the MVC implementation. No, it's not bad. Actually it's a good implementation that is the product of a lot of hard work by Zenders and non-Zenders alike. I use bits and pieces of ZF in my PHP projects and, admittedly, Zend's MVC implementation never made the cut.

He decided a while back on his own implementation and has stuck with it over the years. He still uses the components of the Zend Framework but not the routing and model/view/controller setup of it all. Instead he's opted for his own MVCnPHP methods for his own applications. You can check out these resource for more information: a sample application, the user guide and, of course, the framework's download page.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted an announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 5.2.9 series - PHP 5.2.9RC1.

I was not planning on 5.2.9 before 5.3 was going to come out, but we've accumulated a fairly high number of bug fixes and a couple of issues with new version of libxml and PHP indicate we need another 5.2 release, so here we are. The release cycle should be pretty quick (I hope) and if all goes well the final will be released before the month is out.

You can download this latest release here (Windows release here). If you want to find out how you can help to test this Release Candidate, check out this page on the PHP QA site.

The latest version of the Zend Framework, v1.7.4, has been released for download. Some of the updates and fixes included in this release are:

• Correction of the caching example for Zend_Translate
• Feature to disable XML to Object mapping in Zend_Gdata
• Removing a back require in the jQuery UI helper widget
• Correcting a problem with log writing in Zend_Config_Writer_Ini
• Fixed a problem where Zend/DB/Oracle returned an empty rowset

You can download this latest version from the Zend Framework site.