On of the frameworks rising up through the ranks is Lithium (created by some of the original CakePHP developers). In his latest post Chris Hartjes looks at the framework and a particularly useful feature it includes - filters.

As far as I can tell, Lithium is trying it's hardest to be fast, lightweight, and use all the features that PHP 5.3 has to offer. [...] I want to talk about something that I feel is a very underrated part of Lithium, the ability to define filters. This is a concept that you find in Aspect-oriented programming, and one that I imagine most programmers have never considered. Here's why I think it's a big deal.

The filters in Lithium allow you to use code from other classes without having to actually extend them. As Nate Abele says in one of the comments on the post:

While not having to extend classes or dig inside core functionality is certainly pretty central, the way I've been explaining it is that it's important because classes no longer need to know anything about each other in order to be integrated.

You can find out more about the Lithium project (and RAD-Dev) on the project's wiki.

If you've been looking for a good way to get introduced to the latest version of the Zend Framework but didn't know where to start, you might grab a spot in this upcoming webinar from Zend about the Zend Framework 1.10.

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it's built, and answer your questions about the new release.

The webinar will be happening this coming Wednesday, March 17th, at 9am PST and will be happening via WebEx. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler will be talk about the new features, current functionality that was enhanced and will answer your burning questions. To reserve your spot, head over to the registration page and enter your info.

Phil Sturgeon has posted a look ahead at everything you need to know about the next version of the popular CodeIgniter framework, version 2.0.

It has been 6 months since the last CodeIgniter minor update and 18 months since the last major update. Through all this time we were given no information about the next release of CodeIgniter, but finally 2.0 is on the way.

Because of the Ellis Labs move to Mercurial for its version control system (and BitBucket for the repository), it allows for a more "social coding" environment where it's easier for developers to just fork and contribute. Other major changes for this upcoming version include the fact that PHP4 support will officially be deprecated, driver libraries, application "packages", a smaller reserved controller name list and the dismissal of plugins.

Check out the Changelog for more detailed information as things are updated.

In a recent post to his blog Brandon Savage evaluates Propel (ORM) to see what it has to offer him and his applications.

I've liked Propel ever since I started working with it in the middle of last year; I personally find it easier and more fun to use than Doctrine or other ORMs available today. I was excited to see recently that Propel's development team had released Propel 1.5 as a beta, with a launch of the new features to come soon.

He points out two of the newer features that he particularly likes - collections and on-demand hydration and model queries. The first lets you hydrate the results fetched as you need them instead of all at once and the second does away with some of the issues that came up with making Criteria objects. You can find out more about these and other new features on the Propel "What's New" page.

New from OurBlogLog.com there's a new post that compares Joomla and Drupal based on their features, ease of use and extensibility.

I've had more than a few conversations recently about which CMS is better. From the Joomla camp I hear, "Joomla is easier. Joomla has a great user interface." From its competitor I hear, "Drupal is more flexible and it has tagging." It's the Pepsi versus Coke debate for open source CMSes.

For the two CMSes there's a list of the good and bad things about each - good on Joomla's side was the easy deployment and versioning of content, good for Drupal was its flexibility and the high profile sites that use it. On the bad side, Joomla has a limitation for one-site-one-install and limited permissions handling. Overall, though, the author found that they both had their strengths and weaknesses and that, if you're shopping around for a CMS, find what fits best for you and your organization.

Adrian Schneider has posted a new article to his blog today looking at some of the benefits that come with using Zend_Form in your Zend Framework application.

I'm often asked what my favorite component of Zend Framework is, and I invariably answer: "Forms". Forms have always played an awkward role in the model-view-controller paradigm. Sure, the form is just HTML, but to me, it represents something more abstract than that.

He touches on a few topics like form creation (with many ways to accomplish it), filters, validators, how they can help to make skinny controllers and a few more. A few code examples are sprinkled in where there's a need for clarification.

In this new post from the Ibuildings techPortal today Michael shares some handy tips for working the date and time functions in PHP (all can be used in a non-PHP 5.3 installation).

His tips for these very handy functions include:

• A Unix timestamp is never timezone-specific; if you call time() at the same moment on computers in different time zones, you get exactly the same value back.
• The time string is interpreted as a local time; there is no gm- equivalent [of strptime], or even any way to simulate one, since it ignores the value of date_default_timezone_set. Note that you can impose a timezone on the input string if it contains a timezone abbreviation or offset.
• [With date/gmdate] as with strftime/gmstrftime, the gm- prefix affects whether the result is a representation of the time in the current timezone or in the UTC timezone.
• How does PHP know what your current timezone is? It tries a few different places, including the TZ environment variable and the date.timezone ini option.

Brandon Savage has posted about some interesting things he's come across when working with the DateTime objects in PHP 5.3 including working with timestamps and differences in terms of days/months/etc.

Over time, the PHP DateTime object has become one of the best objects available to PHP developers. This object has grown since early PHP 5 into a robust class that has the ability to do lots of great things. Recently, I was exploring some of the functionality provided by the DateTime object as of PHP 5.3 (and wishing that Ubuntu had PHP 5.3 as a package distribution). Here are some of the new things in PHP 5.3 that are really cool.

He mentions the "add()" and "sub()" methods you can use on an object to get information about the dates/times forward and backwards, the "diff()" to get the differences between two dates and the get/setTimestamp methods to get the current time (or set it).

The DevTheWeb.net blog is back again with the second installment of "Things You Probably Didn't Know About PHP" - some lesser known facts about the popular web language (part one is here).

Some of the things on his list this time include:

• Using the type matching equality operators (like "===" versus just "==")
• Returning multiple values by reference
• Chaining method calls
• Returning the value of print_r as a string
• Using the mysqli functions instead of just mysql

In this new post from the Ibuildings techPortal today Peter Verhage suggests a good way to learn all about the new features in PHP 5.3 - build your own ORM system.

Creating an ORM for PHP is not an everyday task but writing one is a good way to improve your PHP skills, especially if you use some of the additional features PHP 5.3 adds to the language. There are many excellent ORMs (Object Relational Mappings) already in existence and for a real-world project it would probably better to use one of these, but this tutorial uses the task of creating an ORM as a way to take a look at applications for some PHP 5.3 features.

He makes use of namespaces, interfaces, static variable/method handling, magic methods like "__set" and "__unset" as well as abstract classes - all features of some of the latest PHP releases (5.2+). By the end you'll have a basic ORM layer that can do all of the usual CRUD operations as well as more complicated searching and a few things those familiar with the Zend Framework are used to.