Tobias Schlitt, on the heels of the "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast" posting on Ohloh has helped Sebastian Bergmann get the eZ components project entered into their database for some tracking with some interesting results.

eZ components consists of 171,025 lines of code (including markup and code itself). If you subtract the XML, eZ components consist of 96,424 lines of pure PHP code (no docs included, if I got it correcltly), which is rather much in my eyes.

He gives other stats for the component framework including a price estimate for manhours put into the project and how much, on a per-developer basis, has been contributed to each (including things like a code to documentation ratio and total lines of code contributed).

In this new post on Zak Greant's blog, he takes a look at some comments made about the eZ partner program he helped to develop and his responses to clear up some issues.

In a blog post yesterday, CMS expert and Optarian Seth Gottlieb wonders about the eZ partner program.

Gottlieb made comments about it seeming to be a good system, but not quite understanding how it would work when applied. Zak comes back with comments on the reasoning behind the program, how it works to benefit the partner, and how they see those partners, both in giving credit and their involvement with the projects.

For more information on the eZ partner program, check out this page on the eZ website.

Ever wondered just how many PHP frameworks there are out there? Well, this mapping of them gives you a good idea. ColdScripts.com has created a single page, digg-ish voting system for lots of the PHP frameworks out there, letting users pick their favorites.

The brighter/clearer the framework's information, the higher it's ranking. To cast a vote, just click on the "+" (plus) in the box for your choice, or the "-" (minus) to detract from the score.

So far, it looks like CakePHP and Symfony are tied in the lead with Code Igniter and eZ Components following close behind. Be sure to head over and vote for your favorite framework today!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted his own announcement about being accepted as a speaker at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo.

I will present a session titled "Testing PHP Applications with PHPUnit 3" at this year's Zend/PHP Conference. The conference will be held in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley, from October 30 to November 2, 2006.

He also notes that this talk will be different from his previos PHPUnit talks with more "real world" examples with the help of the eZ components and Zend frameworks.

Derick Rethans talks about something he noticed when working with backwards compatibility to PHP 5.1 for the eZ components project - the first of which is that __get doesn't behave itself in some situations.

The first issue is an extra notice in some cases. In our (ezcMailTools) class we implement a method that allows you to "reply" to a parsed e-mail message. you can see we loop over one of the seemingly public variables of the $mail class. However, the ezcMail class does not have this as a public member variable, but instead uses overload.

This all works 'fine' with PHP 5.1, however with PHP 5.2 the following notice was generated for this code:

Notice: Indirect modification of overloaded property ezcMail::$to has no effect in ../Mail/src/tools.php on line 364

The reason for this is that __get() only returns variables in read mode, while foreach() wants a variable in read/write mode as it tries to modify the internal array pointer. As it can't do this PHP 5.2 will now throw a warning on this.

The mentioned code examples are included and he includes the work-around that he found to help keep the issue from popping up again.

Tobias Schlitt has an update posted today about the free eZ components sessions that were previously announced concerning the dates.

forgot that Wolfgang and me moved the dates for the sessions, because Wolfgang is on vacation and wants to take part in the sessions. Sorry for that! So, here are the correct dates:

The first session will now be held on September 20th and the second on September 22nd.

You can find out more about these sessions and about the other offerings from the DynamicWebPages training offerings from their main page.

In his latest post on the SitePoint blog today, Harry Fuecks explains and demonstrates how to send UTF-8 encoded emails with the help of the eZ components library of tools.

One of the subjects I brushed over last week was how you handle UTF-8 in email, because I don't have a full picture on the best way to solve this. The fundamental problem is summarized nicely on Wikipedia's discussion of MIME.

Part of the problem there is there are different approaches to how you can solve this. There's plenty of gotchas and clearly more than than you get by default with PHP's mail function (that's after you fixed your code for email injection). In other words taking a "not invented here" view is going to leave you with a big workload.

So, Harry suggests uisng the Mail classes from the eZ components libraries to send (explicitly) UTF-8 encoded emails. He also includes a simple example of how to send it, showing a message in German to be sent correctly.

Tobias Schlitt opens an invitation to all developers out there seeking to find out more about the eZ components system by offering two free sessions to bring you up to speed.

After the highly successful first online session about eZ components, which I made in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de, we decided to set up another one. Even better: This time we will have 2 sessions and both for free. As last time, the first session "eZ components I" will give a general introduction to our enterprise PHP library and will guide you to the usage of eZ components.

The seconde (new) session "eZ components II" will get into more detail on 2 important components, which are not covered in the first session: eZ Template and eZ Mail.

These sessions will be offered on September 4th (Part 1) and September 6th (Part 2) and to register, simply head to their site and submit your information today. Note: all tutorials will be in German.

On his blog today, Ammar Ibrahim relays a story of how the Mail component from the eZ component frameowrk "saved the day" for a project he was working on.

A few days ago I was asked to develop a simple script for a solidarity campaign. The idea is that people send their photos as attachements to some email. The script would download all images attached and insert a record for that in the database.

I got introduced to eZ components during my last visit to Norway to attend the eZ systems conference. I decided to give it a shot, and oh boy it's just amazing, probably the cleanest and simplest API ever.

The Mail attachment provided all that he needed, and he includes the script (about 50 lines long) that he used to fetch the emails. He did have one issue with the ability to fetch a single email with the tool, but he managed to hack around it (script included as well).

Sandro Groganz has two new posts related to eZ systems today, one detailing their new strategy in the PHP market and the other, the set of slides from the eZ publish Conference this year.

In their new strategy staatement, eZ systems states why they develop the software they do, how it all relates to the eZ publish CMS, and a mention of their plans to built on top of the eZ platfom.

They look at the "mature market" that is the realm of PHP, noting it's a perfect time for them to make this move. They also talk about their development being done in "the PHP way", popular in the community. Their new focus is one driven by the community, too, adapting itself to the current climate of the market. They're also seeking to raise up the standard of their development, at the same time, raising the bar for other PHP platforms out there.

The second post just notes that the slides from the eZ publish Conference 2006 are now online. They primarily discuss the recent developments with the eZ platform and eZ application server.