Rob Allen has a quick post showing how to use PHP's own NumberFormatter function to correctly format currencies (versus just number_format).

I've been using number_format() for a very long time, but recently discovered that within the intl extension there's a NumberFormatter class available too. This is quite a clever class as it is Locale aware and handles formatting currency, including the correct symbol. You can check if you have the intl extension installed using php -m | grep intl and if you don't then you can install it with apt-get install php5-intl or yum install php-intl assuming you use your distro's stock PHP. (If you compile your own, then --enable-intl is the switch you need.)

He gives some bits of example code showing you how to use this object, formatting the same amount for both the typical UK and German Euro formatting. The formater doesn't do any calculations for you, so the number you give it is what will come out the other side (no current exchange checks). He's also created a helper you can use if you're a Zend Framework v2 user.

In a quick post Ruslan Yakushev points out that the PHP Manager for IIS is now available in five different languages to make it even simpler for the non-English speakers out there to use.

A new release of PHP Manager for IIS (version 1.1.2) is available for download. This release includes translations into 5 languages. [...] Note that this release still includes English and it is recommended to upgrade even if you do not need these translations

The new languages are German, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese and Russian and the post thanks each of the community members that helped with the translation. The PHP Manager for IIS is a tool for managing one or more PHP installations on a single IIS server.

For those of you anxiously awaiting the PHP Quality Assurance book from Sebastian Bergmann and Stefan Priebsch, there's good news on Sebastian's blog today (well, for those that speak German).

The German Edition of the PHP Quality Assurance book started shipping. Stefan and I, as well as all our contributing authors, are very happy about this.

The rest of the post describes the book and the case studies that make it up to give you a good overall view of what can be done to help ensure the quality of your code. It will give you some base knowledge of PHP test applications, shows practical results from testing and talks a bit about the current state of quality assurance testing in the online world.

If you're not a German-speaker (or reader, for that matter), keep an eye out for the English edition coming in December 2010!

Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O'Reilly's "PHP5 Cookbook" ("PHP5 Kochbuch") German edition:

The book is published by O'Reilly - written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved "recipes" including explanations of the new PHP features.

Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O'Reilly website.

Over on the ThinkPHP blog there's a mention of an offer coordinating with the recent PHP 5.3 release - huge posters they've made up for the Zend Framework.

Geez, what a week! On Friday, we'll party on celebrating the PHP 5.3 release in Munich/Germany. For those of you who can't be there, I'm sure there will be enough photos on Flickr, Facebook and the like. But, as you may remember, we've produced some very cool Zend Framework posters. I just got an e-mail from Rob Zienert about planetary-sized posters.

You can contact them with your address and your language preference (English/German) at the address in the post. There's also mention of a PHP security poster coming out soon too!

On his blog Sebastian Bergmann has announced "The PHP QA Book" that will be written by himself and Stefan Priebsch looking at quality assurance in PHP projects.

The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and I write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book. [...] Our motivation to write this book is simple: there is no such book on the market and from our experience a book such as this is needed.

The book will be printed in both English and German and will be release in the later part of this year (2009).

If you're a subscriber (or reader) of the German publication "PHP Magazin", be sure you read up on some comments that Christpher Kunz has about some issues around a SQL injection article in the current issue (October/November).

It is not usually my custom to comment negatively or nitpick on other people's articles in magazines, especially not in magazines I have written for. This time however, I really must raise my voice to point out a couple of (well, actually a lot of) issues in an article about SQL injection in the current (October/November) issue of the german "PHP Magazin".

He points out a few problems (like the fact that there's no multi-selects in PHP's mysql support) and things that it would require special permissions (like root) to run on a system.

The ThinkPHP blog points out a recorded (German-only) webinar that Stefan Esser did covering the creation of secure LAMP applications.

Unfortunately, this Webinar was in German, but if you understand German you might be interested in the Webinar recording which is now available at MySQL's website.

The webinar looks at previous attack types, things that MySQL already includes to help prevent SQL injections, handling multi-byte caharacters and correct error handling.

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.

Christopher Kunz has posted a quick review of a book from the Open Source Press covering Serendipity, a popular blogging system.

Yesterday, my review copy of Garvin Hicking's book "Serendipity - Individuelle Weblogs fur Einsteiger und Profis" (Open Source Press, 39,90, ISBN 978-3-937514-54-3) was in the mail. Unfortunately, this book is currently only available in German, but I'm sure Garvin (or someone else) will translate it and publish it (maybe with the nice guys at Packt publishing?) soon.

He notes that the book (the massive book at 750 pages) covers just about everything you'd ever need to know about the Serendipity blogging system. Christopher specifically mentions a few things - a good summary for installation and configuration, a meticulous list of the plugins and the chapter that focuses on administration and security.