If you live in Belgium and have been thinking about attending one of the PHPBelgium meetings but aren't sure what they'd be like, check out this post from Marc Veldman on the Ibuildings blog for a sneak peek.

Last week the Belgian PHP User group held their second meeting. Because the venue was fairly close to our office in Vlissingen, some of us decided to have a look. We were early, so there weren't many people yet, but soon the room began to fill up and in the end there were a little over 30 people. Not bad, given that this was only the second meeting.

Talks given covered methods for improving your PHP development (best practices) and a look at the Zend Framework. There were even raffles for fabulous prizes (like copies of "Enterprise PHP Development", elePHPants and a ticket to attend ZendCon this year). Check out the group's website for more information on the next meeting and other bits of info.

Stefan Esser has released a new update (really two, but one is the latest) to his Suhosin patch for PHP - version 0.9.27.

The previous update (0.9.26) updated the utility with an improved randomness fixing a few issues with an ini setting and the uploadprogress extension as well as adding in a few new settings and updates to the randomizing functions that come included in PHP.

The 0.9.27 update (the most current) updates the patch with a lazy loading change that allows it to work correctly on systems that have it disabled by default (causing the previous patch to not work).

You can grab this latest release, 0.9.27, from the suhosin website.

Gennady Feldman has posted two comments/suggestions about things he thinks could be done to improve the PEAR and PECL websites:

So I attended the PEAR2 presentation and had a chance to bug the guys behind PEAR/PECL. There's definitely exciting stuff happening and they are pushing forward with many exciting ideas.

His suggestions include updates to documentation, crrection broken parts of the API and a "Package News" feature with the ability to leave comments on them.

He's also posted another suggestion - the ability of the authors of the project to provide other links besides the ones just for the project (external documentation, tutorials, etc)

Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

Jeff Moore mentions a "sweet improvement" he noticed when comparing the error message from a PHP4 script to a PHP5 one - the location reported for error mesages.

Sometimes its the little things that make a difference.

His sample script (a function call without the argument needed) errors on the location of the function definition in PHP4, but happily PHP5 recognized the problem for what it's worth and echoed out the location of the call to that function instead for the line number.

One more reason to ditch PHP 4 and go php 5.

Richard Thomas has shared some suggestions on improving the performance and use of PHP's built-in sessions in your site:

If your developing a new website and want to ensure its scalable sessions can be a sticking point. [...] There are a couple problems you may run into with this approach and most database driven examples you may use to base your session code off.

These problems can pretty much be summarized into a single sentence: Every single page load your database is going to be hit at least 2 times, first to read the session data and then session to rewrite all that data.

He includes three suggestions:

• Hash your data when pulled from the DB, if your data hasn't changed don't bother updating
• Figure out what your margin of error is for how long a session has been inactive (don't update if you don't need to)
• Use memcache in conjunction with your database, Check memcache first if its there, if it is use memcache, if its not pull from DB and shove into memcache when you DO update your data update memcache at the same time.

In response to an earlier blog post from another member of the PHP community, Greg Beaver has posted a few thoughts he's had on sharing what's really going on with the PEAR project.

Newly elected PEAR Group member Josh Eichorn posted a blog entry, "How would you improve PEAR" recently. I was impressed with the response, it seems many people outside of PEAR are monitoring it and have thought about how to make it better. However, I was also not so impressed with the poor job we've done letting people know about the newest improvements to PEAR. In my comments, I listed as many as I could think of, but Josh pointed out that I would do well to post these comments in a more public setting, so here goes.

He notes that most of the items mentioned in the comments of Joshua's post are already implemented, save for one - CVS over Subversion. He also shares his renewed obligation of working on the social issues surrounding the project and the efforts that the project is doing to help current developers (stable works the same) and development (get involved! get active!).

Joshua Eichorn is asking for your opinion. He wants some feedback from the community - both PEAR users and not - on how to make what PEAR has to offer even better.

If you were a member of the PEAR group what would you change about PEAR. Please keep in mind were not an all powerful body (Read the constitution for details), but we do have the ability to set policy, and like in any open source project we can make changes through our direct actions.

One comment has already been made with three points: the bundling of PEAR modules into applications, the introduction of a lightweight database layer and making some of the package dependencies a little lighter.

The Zend Framework team has officially released the latest version of the framework - hopefully the first and last beta before the stable release - Beta 0.9.0.

We're pleased to announce Zend Framework Beta Release 0.9.0. This is the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. This marks a new milestone for the Framework project, because with the status of Beta, we are establishing the feature set for Zend Framework 1.0, and we are adopting a commitment to backward-compatibility and interface stability.

Updates in this release include three new components moved into the core (Zend_Translate, Zend_Auth, and Zend_Db_Adapter using mysqli) as well as improvements to things like the MVC output buffering, Zend_Mail features, the inclusion of the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, Zend_Service_Delicious and Zend_Service_Simpy and much more. Check out the full release announcement for more and the development wiki for where things are headed.

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!