In an effort to reduce some of the complexity and possible differences in the translated versions of its documentation, the Symfony project is removing those from the main website and splitting them into their own sections.

A few days ago, we updated the documentation section on symfony.com to remove the French and Italian community translations. From now on, on this website you will only find the original English documentation.

The main reason behind this decision is that when developers browse the documentation published on symfony.com, they must be sure that the contents are always the right ones. In the case of a translation, this means that all its contents in all branches must always be perfectly synced with the original English version.

The English version sees quite a bit of activity and the translated versions (with a lower contributor count) aren't always in sync. They've split out two of the translations and will now have them coordinated each by their own community leader: French and Italian

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted a quick note about the Symfony Live Paris 2012 session videos being available online for free.

During SymfonyLive Paris 2012, we recorded all the sessions that were delivered in the two main rooms. That's a total of more than 15 hours of Symfony and PHP goodness. We promised a free access to all attendees, but we have decided to provide all the videos for free and for everyone. So, if you were not able to join us in Paris, this is a unique opportunity to watch all the great sessions we had.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Realtime Web Apps with WebSockets
• Using MongoDB responsibly
• Advanced Service Container Utilization
• Advanced Silex
• Decoupling Content Management with Create and PHPCR
• ORMs don't kill your database, developers do!

On the Liip blog Thomas Botton points out that the French translation of the Symfony documentation is no online and available for public consumption! He was a part of the group that worked on the translation.

A year ago, I started to work with the Symfony documentation French translation team. At this time, I was actually not imagining that it would take so long to get all that work done.. In case you don't know, as of today, the Symfony documentation team already wrote more than 300 documents! Counting 1 to 4 hours to translate one doc plus the time to review it, you get an idea of the overall workload! But anyway, it's done: the Symfony documentation French translation is finally live on symfony.com!!!

He also mentions some of his reasoning for being a part of the team including it being a way to get more involved with Symfony (and open source) in general and the benefit it now provides to French-speakers wanting to get into the framework. You can find the documentation here.

Padraic Brady has posted about an issue he noticed when working with regular expressions and the "word" character type to find something that's alpha-numeric (including an underscore):

You can find the "word" generic character type used in a lot of PHP code including the Zend Framework. The problem is that the assumption above is incorrect. Now, most of the time these act identically because PHP is compiled using its own packaged PCRE library. However, I've seen more than once systems where this is not the case. Usually in some non-English capacity where additional locale support was considered necessary or standard practice.

The problem comes when PHP is compiled against a custom PCRE library, making it more locale-aware. He gives instructions on how to get this to a testable state on your environment (using an updated PREC library) and get it working for characters in French, like the accented "a" or "e".

Ken Guest has posted about a whitepaper that he was involved in editing - the PHP for Enterprise/Business Whitepaper:

As far as I know this is the first full English language translation and update of the work done by the Association Francaise des Utilisateurs de PHP (French PHP Users Group). Also there is a lot of new content in the Whitepaper that with regards to how PHP is now utilised in Enterprise. Figures have been updated and techniques available in later versions of PHP have been referenced.

He mentions some of the challenges in the translation and thanks a few others for the effort and contributions they made to the project. The whitepaper (pdf) looks at several key topics of PHP in the Enterprise including: suggestions for architecture, integration issues, concurrent use with other languages and how PHP fits into the web application ecosystem.

In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a quick look at a book by Julien Pauli and Guillaume Poncon - "Zend Framework: Bien developper en PHP".

Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It's a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.

You can find the book at a local (French) bookseller or it can be ordered online from someplace like Amazon.fr.

The PHP-GTK Community site has gone multilingual to help reach out to a broader audience:

A new block has appeared today on top right corner of the php-gtk.eu pages, with three little flags : they show you can now navigate the site in one of these languages and, more importantly, automatically find the translated versions of all articles when they exist ... or contribute one yourself if you are logged in to the site.

Right now they offer English, French and German and they're still working on translating some parts of the UI of the site, but the articles and content should be translated over just fine.

The Symfony blog has announced that their Forms in Action has now been posted online and you can download the first four chapters here.

These chapters covers everything you need to get started. If you are a developer, you can read all chapters, from 1 to 4. If you are more a web designer, then you probably only need to read chapter 3 to learn how to layout forms.

They've also been translated into French and can be found here. Content includes form creation, validation, Propel integration, nested forms, internationalization and some of the bundled widgets and validators that come with the framework.

Rob Allen has two new notes today related to the tutorials he's created for the Zend Framework, both the Getting Started and the Zend_Auth ones.

• The team at developpez.com have created a French version of his Zend_Auth tutorial - Débutez avec le Zend Framework
• A link to some handy tips on combining the Getting Started tutorial with Oracle.

Both of these tutorials are found on Rob's site - Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Getting Started with Zend_Auth.

Rob Allen has two new notes today related to the tutorials he's created for the Zend Framework, both the Getting Started and the Zend_Auth ones.

• The team at developpez.com have created a French version of his Zend_Auth tutorial - Débutez avec le Zend Framework
• A link to some handy tips on combining the Getting Started tutorial with Oracle.

Both of these tutorials are found on Rob's site - Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Getting Started with Zend_Auth.