In a recent post to the Ask About PHP blog, there's a quick "first look" at the CakePHP framework from a beginner's perspective.

Finally, I found some time to take CakePHP for a spin. I've heard some really good things about it, and I've been trying to get some time to try it out. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application. I have to say I'm quite impressed.

The post briefly introduces the Model-View-Controller method the framework follows and shows some of the features/benefits it brings with it - the low entry level, its speed, and whether or not it makes for a good "first framework" for other developers.

This new post on the ThinkPHP blog (from Sarah Hermann) talks about some of her first experiences with the popular IDE from Zend, Zend Studio for Eclipse:

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.

In his latest blog post Davey Shafik takes a look back at this past year, 2006, and some of the happenings he experienced during that time.

The yearly look back is now a tradition in the PHP community, I decided this year to lead the pack instead of just hopping on the bandwagon. Of course, it's not official until Derick provides his excellent look back on internals.

There's mentions of his work with the Zend Framework, his book (the Zend Study Guide), and much more. Check out the full post if you'd like to catch up...

Sara Golemon has posted her own look back at the year of 2006 in the PHP:

Well, Davey Shafik started us off with his year-end wrapup so I'll follow suit with mine. The thoughts below are mine and mildly influenced by alcohol. They represent a foggy review of how I experienced the year through the imperfect recollection of mailing list archives.

She covers each month, looking at the people, events, and releases that happened in each. Lots of activity happened on the mailing lists mirroring the happenings in the rest of the PHP community. Check out her great post for the full happenings of the year.

Bothered by the ugly way Xdebug stack traces were turing out, Derick Rethans has created a script to fix that.

I've always been annoyed by the way how Xdebug's stack traces looked liked. So I spend some time on making them look better. I will show the differences according to the following script.

The simple script takes the output and adds a bit of formatting, stripping down the information to make it a bit more clear. Check out the before and after shots to see the difference.

On his blog, Christopher Kunz has a new note for all of those out there specifically running PHPKIT - some security issues that came up and weren't addressed as quickly as need be.

A while back, I reported several vulnerabilities in PHPKIT to the vendors. Although not very well-known in the rest of the world, there's an abundance of installations of this product in german-speaking countries, since it is very easy to install, provides a german user (and administration) interface and has about the same feature set as the infamous PHP-Nuke.

After I reported the vulnerability, no response whatsoever was received. I phoned the vendor, and they told me something about an ominous "community release" and that I should report the issues in their forum. I gave the advisory (including PoC for each hole) to the forum administrator and told them to get a fix out of the door. They responded in a very weird fashion, but allegedly fixed the bugs and released an inofficial patch in the forum.

He goes on in the post, stating why a distribution menthod like is isn't the wisest course of action. Patches are slow in distribution and applicataion versus a full version release. Especially ones distributed via less than an "official" means...

Robert Peake has a new post today with a brief look at where PHP has come from and some of his opinions on the future of PHP in 2006.

We saw the release of PHP 5.1, the renaming of the CSV trunk to 6.0 (in attempts to beat Perl to the punch, apparently), massive security concerns raised by applications ranging from phpBB to Mambo, Zend's numerous partnerships and announcement of the Zend framework, great improvements to Pear, more conferences, more enthusiasm, more realization from the enterprise that PHP is where web application development is headed.

So, where is PHP going from here?

He predicts that the increased push Zend is making for the framework will continue to help improve PHP's image, especially with some of the hurdles PHP has to overcome (including security issues and getting past other lingering problems from PHP's past).

Derick Rethans has posted his own look back at all of the happenings that went on back in 2005.

Welcome to the fourth installment of the PHP Look Back. Just as in previous years, we'll look back on PHP development discussions, bloopers and accomplishments of the last year. This is not supposed to be a fully objective review of last year--note that the opinions in this article are that of the author, and not of the PHP development team.

He covers each month, giving the happenings for each month, linking to various posts and items in each one. Most of the things discussed are more related to the internal PHP development and discusssions from the mailing lists.

In an effort to know where the PHP community has been (and where it will be going), I've posted this lengthy summary over on our blog today with a look back at what made up 2005 for all of the PHPers out there.

Well, here it is, the end of another year and it's times like thes ethat it's always fun to take a look back to where we've come from and how far we've made it on various projects. The PHP community has come so far from those early days of January, and I thought I'd take my own look back via some of the news posts that I've made over on PHPDeveloper.org in the past year (almost 2000 of em) and see which ones stuck out. So, bear with me on this - I know I'll miss a few of the biggies, but I'm going to try to highlight things in each month that really effected the community as a whole.

So, enjoy the read - most of the highlights are there (as well as a few of the problems that happened along the way). Hope you enjoy - and have a happy new year!