In an effort to reduce some of the complexity and possible differences in the translated versions of its documentation, the Symfony project is removing those from the main website and splitting them into their own sections.

A few days ago, we updated the documentation section on symfony.com to remove the French and Italian community translations. From now on, on this website you will only find the original English documentation.

The main reason behind this decision is that when developers browse the documentation published on symfony.com, they must be sure that the contents are always the right ones. In the case of a translation, this means that all its contents in all branches must always be perfectly synced with the original English version.

The English version sees quite a bit of activity and the translated versions (with a lower contributor count) aren't always in sync. They've split out two of the translations and will now have them coordinated each by their own community leader: French and Italian

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted a quick note about the Symfony Live Paris 2012 session videos being available online for free.

During SymfonyLive Paris 2012, we recorded all the sessions that were delivered in the two main rooms. That's a total of more than 15 hours of Symfony and PHP goodness. We promised a free access to all attendees, but we have decided to provide all the videos for free and for everyone. So, if you were not able to join us in Paris, this is a unique opportunity to watch all the great sessions we had.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Realtime Web Apps with WebSockets
• Using MongoDB responsibly
• Advanced Service Container Utilization
• Advanced Silex
• Decoupling Content Management with Create and PHPCR
• ORMs don't kill your database, developers do!

On the Added Bytes blog there's a humorous post about what PHP would be like if it were British:

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. [...] He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English". PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking?

Suggestions include replacing the $ with £, more correct "Hello worlds" and comments on abbreviations in function names, eloquence in control structures, spelling, manners and class(es). Check out the comments for more lovely puns.

Leonid Mamchenkov has a quick new post to his blog sharing a regular expression that can be used to check that a string contains only English or Latin characters (no Unicode allowed).

Today at work I came across a task which turned out to be much easier and simpler than I originally thought it would. We have have a site with some user registration forms. The site is translated into a number of languages, but due to the regulatory procedures, we have to force users to input their registration details in English only. Using Latin characters, numbers, and punctuation.

Thankfully the PCRE regular expression engine bundled with PHP makes it simple - it uses a standard regular expression without anything special to accommodate for Unicode characters. He notes that adding the "/u" modifier to the expression makes it "totally malfunction" (where strings are treated as UTF-8). If you'd like an example of some of the tricks that go into supporting Unicode in a regex, see this comment in the PHP manual.

Over on the ThinkPHP blog there's a mention of an offer coordinating with the recent PHP 5.3 release - huge posters they've made up for the Zend Framework.

Geez, what a week! On Friday, we'll party on celebrating the PHP 5.3 release in Munich/Germany. For those of you who can't be there, I'm sure there will be enough photos on Flickr, Facebook and the like. But, as you may remember, we've produced some very cool Zend Framework posters. I just got an e-mail from Rob Zienert about planetary-sized posters.

You can contact them with your address and your language preference (English/German) at the address in the post. There's also mention of a PHP security poster coming out soon too!

On his blog Sebastian Bergmann has announced "The PHP QA Book" that will be written by himself and Stefan Priebsch looking at quality assurance in PHP projects.

The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and I write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book. [...] Our motivation to write this book is simple: there is no such book on the market and from our experience a book such as this is needed.

The book will be printed in both English and German and will be release in the later part of this year (2009).

The devReview.com website has put together The Big List of as many of the PHP frameworks out there they could find:

For the start of a new year, it was time to clean out the list of PHP frameworks. A few have fallen by the wayside, but many new ones have been added. It seems that patterns and MVC is still all the rage, but less are professing to being Rails clones, though the inspiration of convention is still strong. There are a wide variety of framework types. From full stack (cakePHP, Symfony) to components (eZ), a bit of both (Zend) and minimalist (LightVC, TinyMVC, Pluf).

Requirements to be on the list include that the framework must be PHP-based, have a recent code release in the last 12 months, needs to be available in English and not including frameworks that can be considered content systems themselves.

As of the time of this post, there are around 50 active frameworks listed - everything from CakePHP and the Zend Framework out to eZ Components and Prado. Links for each include their project homepage and some reviews the site has done.

After taking part in this year's PHP Brasil conference, Chris Jones has issued a challenge to the PHP group members and developers there - do everything you can to be a part of the global PHP community.

At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. [...] In post-conference conversation, Luke Crouch (SourceForge) and I touched on what is gained from attending conferences, and how quickly technology is picked up in Brazil. So, one thing I specifically did during the conference was to encourage the organizers and presenters to make the English speaking world more aware of their activities.

He points out a talk that's already been translated to English and some of the people he met that are part of global PHP-using companies.

The PHP-GTK Community site has gone multilingual to help reach out to a broader audience:

A new block has appeared today on top right corner of the php-gtk.eu pages, with three little flags : they show you can now navigate the site in one of these languages and, more importantly, automatically find the translated versions of all articles when they exist ... or contribute one yourself if you are logged in to the site.

Right now they offer English, French and German and they're still working on translating some parts of the UI of the site, but the articles and content should be translated over just fine.

The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.

In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).

He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.