Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

Terry Chay, a popular speaker at many of the PHP conferences and photog to the geek chic crowd in San Francisco, will be speaking at the upcoming PHP Meetup for the SF PHP group. He'll be giving a talk titled "OOps! The PHP Fear and Loathing Guide to OO Design".

How does the PHP developer in the trenches create powerful object-orientation code? By doing what the PHP's architects did, of course: cherry picking the most pragmatic of OOP principles and patterns! This talk is targeted at the PHP developer who has basic knowledge of PHP OOP syntax but wants to find out where OOP principles can fit into a program.

If you'd like to attend, head over to the meetup page for the event and let them know you're coming. It'll be happening at the CNet Network offices February 7th @ 7pm.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted their new statistics for PHP usage in the community for this past month:

After the small decrease in the last month, PHP made it back up easily. For the first time since April 2006, the 20 million mark on the number of domains has been passed. In contrast to the previous month that means a jump of nearly 800,000 domains. The number of IP addresses, on which PHP is installed, also has numbers worth checking out. With 1,332,514 IP addresses on record, this month's numbers are the highest conditions since September 2004.

You can check out the graph and the statistics for the last year in their statistics page of their site.

php|architect magazine has released their latest issue for February 2006.

In this month's issue, the stories include:

• the cover article from Derick Rethans that takes a look at the popular component framework - eZ components
• Daniel Kushner talks about the creation/success of the Zend Certification
• an article from Marco Tabini that looks at "doing it Japanese style" - using simplicicty to reduce errors
• Marcus Baker talks, in his column Test Patterns, about how one can develop their apps (methods of development)

If you're not already a subscriber, you can check out this latest issue's coneents and order your copy today. Single issues are about $3.50 USD for PDF ($8.50 for print) and the subscription is only $35.39 USD for PDF ($40 USD for print).

From Richard Miller's blog today, there's a new post with content from the Utah PHP Users Group meeting that's just passed (Feb. 2006) on the topic of custom 404 pages.

When you try to visit a web page that doesn't exist, the server usually returns a 404 error message - "Page Not Found". At the Utah PHP Users group meeting last Thursday, Mac Newbold presented on custom 404 pages. Custom 404 pages can help maintain your website branding, help you fix broken links, and help your users find something useful when they don't find what they're looking for.

Custom 404 pages are even more powerful when you combine them with PHP. I certainly didn't expect the flood of ideas that Mac presented for using custom 404 pages.

Among the suggestions of things to do with the error pages are things like: sending an email when someone gets a 404, search the site for something similar, use it as a redirect for old to new URLs, and more.

According to this new post on the PHP Magazine site today, the latest edition - the February 2006 Issue - of the International PHP Magazine has been released.

Topics covered in this issue include:

• Building Ning Apps - by David Sklar
• a look at SimpleXML in PHP - by Thomas Myer
• Code Generation Techniques - by Jon Ramsey
• "Navigating the maze of Phorum" - by Brent Knigge, Boulos Mansour and Andy Cachia
• and a spotlight on KINKY, an application framework with over 300 modules

You can check out the full detailed table of contents for every article in the issue, or just hop on over and puchase the issue today - a single issue only costs around $5.00 USD.

The latest episode of php|architect's Pro-PHP Podcast has been posted on the site today - a Newscast of the latest (as posted here on PHPDeveloper.org).

Topics mentioned in the episode include:

• the "Preview Release" of the Zend Framework
• a PHP Security Architecture proposal
• Netcraft mentioning the ever-growing target PHP is for hackers
• the stable release of eZ components (and a webcast about it)
• and an interview with Joshua Eichorn (creator of the HTML_AJAX package)

You can grab the latest episode from the site, or subscribe to their feed to get them delivered right to your client...

Davey Shafik has this new post today with information about the first Tampa Bay area PHP User Group meeting.

To everybody in the Tampa Bay Area, the Tampa Bay PHP User Group is having its first meeting in just under two weeks.

Brian Fertig whom I have never met, but in our brief e-mails this week seems like a pretty cool guy has gone to the effort of getting things set up for us.

The meeting is going to be held February 17th at 7pm at a Golden Corral there in Tampa. If you'd like to attend, you can RSVP on the Meetup page (so they know how much space to reserve) as well as get more information about the location...

The Atlanta PHP Users Group has posted a reminder about their February meeting happening tonight, the 2nd at 7pm in Tucker, Georgia.

Our February meeting will start with a new short session of PHP Tips & Tricks. This will become a regular tradition at our meetings, and we hope it encourages and helps newcomers and seasoned PHP programmers alike. See Chris's reminder to bring your Tips & Tricks: http://www.atlphp.org/node/120

Following the Tips & Tricks session, we will dive into another new segment that will surface from time-to-time at meetings throughout the year: PHP Topics. PHP Topics will be a programmer-to-programmer open discussion forum about some topic related to the PHP community. We'll do this on a semi-regular basis (i.e. once a quarter). If it turns out to be a popular segment, we may set aside some time for a short discussion at each meeting.

You can get the full details for the meeting here including directions to the meeting place.

According to the interview Andi Gutmans just did with Marcus Whitney of the Pro-PHP Podcast, there's some news coming soon from Zend about the Framework.

We are going to roll out much more information in February, and we realize it's a bit scarce on information, to be honest, we just had too much to do on the development side, to start rolling out bits and pieces of information.

So, February we're going to roll out more information, we're going to have the preview version where people can play around with it. [...] There's a lot of work that still has to be done there. We're going to be posting more information and launching a Zend Framework site, where we're going to have CVS, and you can see the source code, you can see the manual, and so on. We are going to publish a roadmap so that people know where we're heading.

For the rest of the interview and more informtion about the Zend Framework, you can check out this interview, and for all of the details on this "preview release" of the Zend Framework, keep an eye here - we'll let you know as soon as we know...