The PHP::Impact blog has posted about a presentation given by Cal Henderson of the Flickr team on the site's architecture and how it uses PHP.

Topics mentioned in the talk included Flickr's use of shards, memcached, Smarty, ImageMagick, Apache and cvsup for distributing files across their networks.

The presentation can be viewed/downloaded from here.

This year's Dutch PHP conference (that happened in Amsterdam) has wrapped up and several members of the PHP community (and groups) have posted their slides and some of their experiences attending. Here's a few:

• A summary from the PHP Women website
• Lorna Mitchell's slides from the conference - PHP Deployment with SVN
• A wrapup from Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Shots from Flickr tagged for the conference
• some thoughts from Paul Wander of Ibuildings on the conference

Looks like the conference was a great success - thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Ibuildings team and Zend.

This year's Dutch PHP Conference has come to a close and several members of the community have posted their own wrapups and slides from the event. Here's some of them:

• Stefan Priebsch's slides - PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A Look Ahead
• Ivo Jansch's wrapaup
• Helgi's coverage of each day - Day 1
• Lorna Mitchell's experience giving her talk there at the conference and her first day summary
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - New Features in PHPUnit 3.3, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

If you weren't able to attend, be sure to check out some of the pictures from the conference over on Flickr (and if you were there, be sure to tag your own pictures with "dpc08").

Hasin Hayder has posted part one of a series he's doing on making an application similar to the popular FriendFeed site in PHP.

Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"

Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.

He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).

Ivo Jansch has posted about a project he's started on to create his own "first mashup" of PHP, Flickr, Google Maps, the Zend Framework and ATK.

I have been inspired by Cal Evans' mashup experiment, which he did a presentation on at the Dutch PHP Conference last month. Also, I was annoyed with having to consult many different resources when I plan a business trip. So I began building frekfly, my own little mashup.

The post mentions two versions of the mashup - an initial version that pulled the services together and a second version that added in a web service for hotel information. This current version can be found at frekfly.com

A new tutorial has been posted on the SitePoint site today - Jonathan Snook's look at combining CakePHP and Flicker to build a photo gallery.

Want to share your Flickr photostream with the world, but only once you've given it a nice, customized touch? Look no further than CakePHP -- and a few lines of code -- to pull off some magic! In this article, we'll use the Flickr API and CakePHP to take the images we've loaded onto Flickr and use them to build our own, non-Flickr web gallery.

He steps the reader through the tools needed (including the Flickr Component for CakePHP) and how to get things set up and working together. With just a few simple calls to the Flickr API, the script grabs a photoset, gets the information about them and, finally, grabs a list of them to use in the photo gallery layout. He even throws in a sample usage of the popular Lightbox Javascript helper to show off the photos.

In a new post on the Zend Developer Zone (by Daniel Vecchiato) pointing out a new tutorial that combines the Zend Framework with another framework, CodeIgniter, to enhance each's power.

The tutorial (Using Zend Framework components in Code Igniter) will introduce you to an easy way to integrate the Zend Framework libraries (a lot!) into Code Igniter PHP Framework.

In particular we will build an example in which we use the Zend_Service_Flickr to retrieve images based on a specific tag ('climbing' in this tutorial).

The tutorial steps you through a quick installation of the Zend Framework, but assumes that you already have CodeIgniter installed. Then it's a simple matter of combining the two, extending the Zend Flickr service client and grabbing photos related to "climbing".

Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.

I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.

The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.

The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.

John Herren has posted his notes from the (just passed) Web Builder 2.0 Conference that happened over in Las Vegas. PHP had its presence there through John's "PHP Powers Mashups" talk and others like Chris Shiflett.

There was plenty to see and do at the conference besides PHP and John highlights just a few:

• AJAX Optimization talks
• An overview of some Flickr Stats
• Google's mashup offerings
• An introduction to
• and some talk of benchmarking Ajax