In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell takes a look at some of the current statistics around PHP version adoption - all the way from the ancient 5.0 through the shiny new (upcoming) 5.5 releases.

PHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don't do is upgrade. PHP's current usage statistics look like this (source and raw numbers are if you want them):

She points out that around half of the results show that sites are running on unsupported versions of PHP (<=5.2) but notes that it's not always their choice. There's lots of factors that play into upgrading these versions that are not always in the user's control (like the speed of distro updates). She covers some of the things that came around in the newer versions of PHP 5.2 and 5.3 including some large performance jumps, especially in 5.4.

In truth, the future is already here for those people on PHP 5.4 and beyond. Keeping PHP upgraded is just part of our regular maintenance workflow, and the language is progressing in regular and manageable steps. If you've been left behind then I strongly recommend that you start making plans for upgrading your platform, or moving to a newer one.

On the Symfony Blog there's a new post sharing the results of a recent poll they took of some of their developers covering things like job title, how long they've been working with Symfony and their work with the framework.

Before the Symfony Live Conference in Paris, we conducted the first Symfony community survey. The raffle winners will soon be contacted by Anne-Sophie. And without further ado, here are the survey results!

Results are posted both in numbers and in easy to read graphs to questions like:

• What is your job?
• How did you get to know symfony?
• Do you use any other PHP framework/CMS?
• What is the average size of projects that you/your company work on?
• How do you get trained?

The last question is interesting - it asked the community how many would be interested in getting a Symfony certification. The results were almost broken into equal thirds of "yes", "no" and "somewhat interested. You can see the full results here.

Building on the graphing tutorial in his last post Sameer continues on looking at graphs in PHP with this new post showing how to create an "agency matrix" of a currently built graph.

Building a graph is not enough; we also need the ability to search through it. To make it easier to build search algorithms, it is useful if we can represent the graph and its connections in a different way; adjacency matrix being one such representation. An adjacency matrix is a means of representing which vertices (or nodes) of a graph are adjacent to which other vertices.

He includes some sample code to extract the data from a graph (built with the PEAR Structures_Graph package) and create a basic "table" of information about each nodes' connections.

In the latest post to his blog Sameer Borate takes a look at using the Structures_Graph package from PEAR to create data structures in PHP with linked nodes for directed and undirected graphs.

The Pear Structures_Graph package allows creating and manipulating graph data structures. It allows building of either directed or undirected graphs, with data and metadata stored in nodes. The library provides functions for graph traversing as well as for characteristic extraction from the graph topology.

After sharing the one-line install, he shows how to create some instances of the package's Nodes and how to connect them to a graph and link them to other nodes. He includes a few examples - a simpler one with multiple nodes joined in a directed graph, another showing how to associate data with a node and how to query the graph for node connections and testing to see if the graph is acyclic.

Kurt Payne has a new post to his blog showing how to use register_tick_function with a callback to help benchmark and profile your application to find its pain spots.

A profiler gives you the ability to trace the performance of your code through every function call and create an overview of your system's performance over a certain time period and helps you make intelligent decisions about where to look for problems. [...] But what if you're in an environment where you can't install [the xdebug or xhprof] extension? Luckily, php has a built-in function called register_tick_function that gives you a way to hook in to every user function that's called. With this, you can write a profiler yourself.

A bit of sample code illustrates his method - it defines a "do_profile" function and assigns it with the register_tick_function call. This function generates a debug backtrace and echos out the function path it took to get to that spot (output is included). He provides code for a bit more useful profiling and points out that it could easily be graphed to help visualize the problems. Also included are a few caveats to watch out for when using this method of profiling.

New from the XPertDeveloper.com blog there's a tutorial showing how to use the Facebook graph API to get page details via a simple cURL request (cURL PHP support required for the example).

Here is the technique to get the detail of the Facebook page with Graph API and PHP. This is the very easy method to get the Facebook page detail. So Let's see how to get this done. With this method you can get details of any Facebook page [inluding] name, picture, link, website, products, description and if the user can post to it.

The sample code is only a few lines - it uses the Facebook page ID (easy to grab from the URL) and fetches a URL with it as a parameter. The output is returned as a standard PHP object with all of the properties attached (decoded from JSON). This is just one of many methods the Facebook graph API has, so check out their documentation for more methods and details on returned values.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post highlighting the use of pChart to graph out the data from your PHP application. pChart provides an easy interface to draw graphs with GD, supporting alpha transparency, shadowing, spline/cubic curves and much more.

Created and maintained by Jean-Damien Pogolotti, a systems engineer based in Toulouse, France, pChart is a library that creates anti-aliased charts and graphs using PHP. It's object-oriented code has been recently redesigned and makes it easy to add beautiful, eye-catching data. The library is free for non-profit use and for inclusion in GPL distributed software; licensing plans for other uses start at just 50 Euro. In this article I'll take you through installing pChart and using it to generate a basic chart, line chart and plot graph.

He walks you through the download and installation of the tool as well as showing the code you'll need to include to get started with a first script. Their examples show how to create both single- and three-series charts with some sample data and some screenshots of output.

On the NetTuts.com site today they have a (very complete) guide to help you wrangle the Facebook Graph API and make it useful for your application. It makes use of the official Facebook PHP SDK to interface with the Graph API.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make your applications more social with Facebook? It's much easier than you think! In this tutorial, we'll be building an application that reads and publishes data to and from Facebook using Facebook's Graph API.

The tutorial helps you get signed up on the Facebook developer site, create a first sample application, set up the SDK and make a simple page (with an added bonus of using the Twitter Boostrap for look/feed). There's a section covering permissions, what kind of data you can expect publicly for both users and posts. They wrap it up with an example of posting back to Facebook though the API and updating the status on your account. The complete code for the tutorial is also available for download.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a recent post showing you how to connect your application with Facebook's graph API and grabbing the current user's public profile information.

In recent years, [Facebook's] influence has dramatically grown thanks to the Facebook Platform, a set of APIs which third-parties can use to create or extend applications which tightly integrate with Facebook.com's features and users. [...] PHP-minded developers are particularly fortunate, as the Facebook PHP SDK doesn't only provide users a powerful solution for interacting with the social graph, but because it's actively maintained by the Facebook development team is often the first of several available APIs to offer the latest features and bug fixes.

He points out the github repostory for grabbing the Facebook SDK, the information you'd get (at a minimum) from the API and the sort of detail you can expect from a user logged into your application. Sample code is included for this last example.

On Script-Tutorials.com there's a new tutorial posted showing you how you can get better curves on your graphs with PHP and GD (the key is in the "CubicSplines" class, providing a few extra calculations to make "splines", a mathematical method for smoothing out values).

Today I have new article for PHP. I will tell you about drawing graphs with GD. Plus - we will smooth our graph with curve lines using cubic splines interpolation method. You can read more about method at Wikipedia.

All of the code is included in the post, ready for cop and pasting - the HTML, CSS plus the PHP to generate the graph, plot the points and apply the cubic splines values. You can check out a live demo of it in action or just download the code and get started on your own.