The PHPClasses.org website has posted a new book review about the Packt Publishing offering "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites" (book by David Mercer, review by Zoltan Hunt).

This Packt book takes the reader through installing the Drupal software, configuring and theming, adding content and deploying a Web site. It is aimed at the end user who is looking to setup and customize Drupal's themes, but not actually write their own modules, which would be a topic for book on its own.

The review talks about some of the origins of the content management system, the contents of the book (use cases, introductions to the functionality, etc) and how to manage your site.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

One of the more popular PHP community sites out there, PHPFreaks, has launched the completely reworked version of their site:

Recently there have been many changes to PHP Freaks. A significant change is the total rewrite and redesign of the main site. The old one was taken down after vulnerabilities were found in the source code. For the last couple of months we have been working on making what you are currently looking at now. The release has been postponed a couple of times, but people have been patiently waiting for the site.

They've added a blog to the mix (which this post is a part of) to help keep visitors up to date on the site's happenings and various other news from the admins. If you find a bug, let them know, otherwise - enjoy the new site and check out all of the same great content.

According to the CyberInsecure.com website around a half-million websites running PHPBB were hacked in a large coordinated effort.

More than half a million websites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of trojans. This ongoing campaign includes new malware hosting domains and new trojans variations. All of the sites are running older or misconfigured versions of "phpBB," an open-source message forum manager. Open-source popular applications like phpBB tend to be often targeted by mass scanning and exploiting tools.

The hack redirected visitors through several steps ultimately ending up on a page that tried to take advantage of errors in older Internet Explorer and RealPlayer versions. The article talks about exactly which viruses could have caused the problems and the wide range of sites (both in topic and location) that were effected.

The best way to protect you and your PHPBB install from something like this happening is to get the latest version of the software and learn how to configure it correctly.

According to Brian Moon's blog today, the popular PHP forum package Phorum has hit the 10 year mark in its development:

So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block. "* Created 04/16/1998" Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project.

The current version of Phorum is 5.2 stable and can be downloaded directly from their site.

The folks over at php|architect have consolidated their community efforts (news, the podcast and their forums) all under one new website - the C7Y PHP Community Website.

Welcome to the new community site. We've still got a bit of finishing work to do, but I think everyone would agree that this is much better than the old site! Let us know what you think.

Rather than having their community efforts spread out over their current site, they decided on on centralized resource where people can get the latest news, check out the latest podcast and interact with fellow PHPers out there on the web.

Be sure to check it out for yourself and let them know what you think.

In a new post to the his blog today, Stefan Mischook takes a look at what some of the most common components of a PHP web application include.

Understanding PHP theoretically, is only the beginning of actually truly knowing it. Once you sit down and start writing code, things will seem to magically clear up as you go along.

He gives examples of web application types and talks a bit about databases, a "key part of most web applications".

The phpBB development team have released an announcement about a new podcast that the application's developers will be creating.

We are now live after much discussion and work internally with the first episode of the Official phpBB Podcast!

The first episode has been posted to the official podcast website and includes talk of browser cookies, COPA vs COPPA, jaber support, PHP5 support and board/category/forum/subforum differences.

You cna check out this latest podcast in this post or subscribe to their feed (either normally or in iTunes) to get this and future episodes.

Brian Moon has posted about the release of the latest (alpha) version of one of the more popular PHP-based forum softwares out there - Phorum 5.2 alpha.

Yes! Its here! Phorum 5.2 has reached alpha status. Its been over a year since we branched the 5.1 code and started on 5.2. A lot has changed and Phorum is better for it. Much of the success of Phorum 5.2 goes to Maurice Makaay. He has done a lot of work to make the core code cleaner and easier for module developers. He has also been instrumental in the documentation project. As for new features and changes, below are a few. We are still updating a wiki page with all the changes and features at http://www.phorum.org/development/wiki/Phorum52News.

Updates for the users and admins include:

• Brand new template. Emerald is a more modern, full featured template. It uses many interface design recommendation used by usability professionals.
• Better error messages when posting to help your users know what is wrong.
• New announcement module that gets announcements out of the message list and into a more prominent position.
• More modules included with Phorum and officially supported.
• Sanity checks updated to help admins know if their Phorum is running properly.

According to this new post on the PHPClasses.org blog today, they're launching some premium services for the users of the site:

It is with great pleasure that I announce that the PHP Classes site finally launched the premium services for PHP developers that use the site. [...] The premium subscriptions are the alternative that I found to make this site provide a pleasant user experience and hopefully provide useful features that can help making the life of PHP developers better.

He goes into detail on what all is involved in the premium subscriptions including:

• No advertising
• Own site search
• Recorded searches
• Notable packages
• PHP Specialist forums

There's also several other services that are listed as "coming soon" to further enhance the site - customizable site design templates, new class wish lists, personalized bookmarks, etc. The cost for all of the premium services comes to $5 USD/month (with $15 USD due at a time because of restrictions on the payment gateway).

Another pair of interesting notes about the future of the site are mentions of revenue sharing for best contributors and the opportunity for free subscriptions.

You can get complete information about these premium services from its page on the PHPClasses.org website.