Continuing on from his first Symfony2 is getting easier post, Fabien Potencier has two new posts in the series looking at other aspects of the framework that have improved to make developers' lives easier.

In part 2 he talks about a patch that's been applied to help with errors in the autoloading process and throw an exception if something's' not found.

Part 3 talks about an update to help make the pathing shorter on the Doctrine configuration files and the ability to move it to a centralized mapping file in the app/config.

In an effort to keep track of some of the lesser seen patches to the core of PHP, the Zend Developer Zone has started a weekly summary that talks about the PAT directory:

The PAT directory contains patches (fixes and improvements for the C source code behind PHP) that have been sent to the internal developers' mailing list by members of the wider PHP community. The mailing list is fairly busy - as are the developers - and patches aren't always noticed by someone able to review and perhaps apply them; this can lead to people repeatedly mailing the same patch to the list in the belief that they're being ignored!

The idea behind the posts is to provide a listing of those patches for those looking for them (including the PHP dev team) until they've been evaluated and moved out of the PAT directory purgatory.

Tobias Schlitt has a new post today concerning the improvements that's been made to the PEAR::Services_Trackback package.

I finally found some time and improved the trackback handling on PEARWeb:

• HTML entities in trackbacks are now decoded before using the bad-word-filter (and the list has been updated)
• Only 3 trackbacks per 30 minutes will be accepted from a host from now.
• If both of these criteria do not match, it uses DNSBL and SURBL mechanisms to check trackbacks additionally.

He comments on how it will work now with these improvements and the popularity that the package is garnering...

There's a new post over on PHPBuilder.com today that has a look at "What's new in PHP5 and PHP6" - a look at the present, and forward to the future of this great language.

Most PHP installations out there are still running PHP 4.x. PHP 5.0 has been out a while, and PHP 5.1.1 has just been released. For those of you who haven't yet upgraded, this month I look at some of the changes you can expect to find in the newer versions of PHP, as well as a preview of what you can look forward to in PHP 6.

They go through PHP5 first, mentioning especially the new object model. PHP 5.1.x is briefly mentioned (especially 5.1.1 just released) but not that many new things were added in that edition. From there, the rest is a look at PHP6 and what we can expect from it - items removed/added to the core, the removal of register_globals, and one of the largest developments: Unicode support.