Johannes Schluter has posted about an interesting little project he's worked up to find his own path to usefulness in Twitter - a PHP extension that tweets bugs to his account.

The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself.

His "little PHP extension" that automatically sends the reported error out to the designated account. Of course, it tends to slow things down (connection to a remote machine and all) but it could be useful for sending an SMS is something pops up.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today (from Vikram Vaswani) that focuses on making charts and graphs with the help of the GDChart extension for PHP.

This extension, which is freely available from PECL, can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in dynamically generating graphical representations of numerical data at run-time. Over the next few pages, I'll introduce you to this extension, illustrating its important features and showing you just how easy it is to get your Friday evening back.

The tutorial shows how to get and install the extension as well as including a few usage examples - a simple charting of values (with the different chart types defined), comparing more than one set of data, changing the aesthetics of the output and a detailed look at a few of the chart types' output.

William Candillon passed along a note about a new PECL extension that's been released that adds the power of XQuery to the PHP world.

PHP developers beware: Zorba now has a language binding for PHP 5! Most PHP developments have to deal with XML and since PHP version 5, the support for XML has been greatly improved and developers can use various extensions that speak XML. We strongly believe that XQuery was the missing piece in this set of tools and therefore we are very excited by this release.

You can get the full details from this post to his blog including installation instructions and usage examples for everything from a simple query to a more complex XML insertion.

In a new post to his blog David Parra talks about compiling extension on Windows (specifically his ktaglib one).

This is actually the reason to not even try to compile my ktaglib extensions under Windows. Well but this approach is doomed to fail as most of the developers out there use Windows as their operating system. [...] So actually I ended up booting up windows again (well after searching for the harddisk that contains a running windows) and try to compile it. Otherwise my fellow collegues wouldn't be able to fix my buggy PHP code.

He talks about the pecl2 updates and how it makes compiling on a Windows system easier than before and two resources that budding Windows extension developers can use to get started - the PHP.net wiki and a screencast from Elizabeth Smith that can help out quite a bit.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today showing how to use the open source encryption tool GnuPG from inside PHP.

While GnuPG works very well as a standalone tool, it also plays very well with PHP. This integration is possible due to PHP's ext/gnupg extension, which provides a flexible and powerful API to access GnuPG functions for encryption, decryption, message signing and verification, and key maintenance. And your mission (should you choose to accept it) will be to accompany me over the next few pages, while I give you a crash course in this API, showing you how easy it is to integrate these functions into your next PHP application.

The tutorial walks you through some of the basic concepts behind the "lock and key" GnuPG implements and how to get the extension installed so you can follow along. His examples range from a basic encryption of a string out to a full encrypt/decrypt example, how to sign information with a key and even a method for sending an encrypted message.

Antony Dovgal has a quick post today about a PECL extension that makes for quick and easy full-text searching on standard SQL databases.

As some of you might have noticed, I've been a bit busy lately creating new PECL extension - sphinx. The extension provides an interface to a feature-rich fulltext search engine Sphinx written by Andrew Aksyonoff. We (Andrew and me) made our best to keep the extension as compatible to the pure-PHP API (shipped with Sphinx) as possible in order to make the transition easier.

The PECL page has already been created as well as a page in the manual for how it works. He also briefly mentions the installation (including teh required libraries).

Christopher Jones mentions the release of the latest OCI8 component for PHP - version 1.3.4 stable.

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.

He also mentions the work on the Windows version of the extension that he's been up to with the plan to make two OCI8 DLL releases for the future - one using 10g libraries and the other using 11g.

The PHP.net website has a note posted about the restructuring of the manual

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions.

Changes were made in the function reference and in the predefined variables and context options/parameters sections as well as information on upcoming features like namespaces, late static bindings and Phar (to be included in PHP 5.3). The manual is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

Continuing on in their look at sending MIME emails with PHP, DevShed has posted a better way for you to determine the correct MIME type of the file you're wanting to send (third part of the series).

I demonstrated how to build a modular MIME mailer class in PHP 4; it was provided with the capacity to send messages in plain text, and to work with different types of file attachments. This class implements a private method, called "getMimeTypes()," which, as its name would suggest, comes in handy for determining the correct MIME type of a given file. [...] However, the logic implemented by this method is rather primitive and can definitely be improved.

They start with a review of the previous code (PHP4) and show how to get the correct mime type of the file based on the extension mapped to an array of types.