Welcome to a brand new year in the PHP community - all sorts of possibilities are out there for this next year, but let's take a second to look back at 2006 and see some of the happenings to know where we've come from.
Read on for the full story!
January
The year started out great with the two new PHP releases - 4.4.2 and 5.1.2 (including the final release candidates for both versions
to prepare for the final). Jim Plush posted about a growing trend in the PHP world - the decoding of Zend Encoder files (including
Zend's inattention to it) and Chris Shiflett got the ball rolling with more on PHP insecurity.
The eZ components crew saw the release of of the stable version of their application development platform - eZ compontents - and
announced a workshop to be held in Germany to give developers the full informetion. Some developers were still looking back at 2005
including Chris Shiflett and Derick Rethans while others in the community looked forward towards the just announced New York PHP
Conference & Expo.
The Pro PHP Podcast and php|architect magazine teamed up in a collaboration that came to be known as "php|architect's Pro PHP Podcast",
providing the latest news and interviews in a compact, audio form for the masses to download. One if their first shows was an interview with Andi Gutmans of Zend.
February
The big talk going on in February was the collaboration between Oracle and PHP. Rumors were floating around about what it could be
about and how Zend would be involved. Several people mentioned it including
Pierre-Alain Joye,
Christian Wenz and
Richard Davey.
Some negative vibes were floating around this month with some comments from Marco Tabini about how the "PHP brand" has been
diluted by some of the actions of the community and from the Sephitroth site that asked if PHP5 was just a big failure because of its
slow adoption rate. Tim Bray also had some comments on PHP and what he thought of it and it's future. Chauy.com helped to balance
it out a bit, though, with their positive spin on LAMP being the most popular server system ever.
This month also saw the release of PEAR 1.4.7 and talk of best practices, MVC frameworks (a top 10 list), and code coverage with PHPUnit 3.
March
March was a big month in the PHP community - it was
the first release of the (now infmous) Zend Framework, their first Release Candidate.
This first release was soon followed by another,
Candidate 0.1.2, to help address some of the issues that had already popped up. With the
framework project going strong, many updates were made around it including new additions to the
manual and many comments from the community.
The SitePoint PHP blog
looked at the Zend_Filter component,
Paul Jones mentioned
some of the differences between it Solar (his
framework),
Davey Shafik gave an example of
using it with Flickr and PHPied.com showed how simple it was to
grab an RSS feed with it.
IBM also published a popular item on its developerWorks blog - a suggested reading list for any PHP developer, both budding and the old hands.
The latest version of PEAR was released (1.4.9) and two release candidates were made available for PHP - 5.1.3RC1 and 5.1.3RC2. Even more
looked towards the future with a look at PHP6 from DotVoid.com and the announcement about the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo to
happen later in the year in San Jose, California. PHP statistics also were seeing a rise, encouraging the community even further.
April
When April rolled around, things were still going strong in relation to the Zend Framework. More and more tutorials were popping up around it -
people were
integrating it with Smarty,
integrating it with eZ components, using it with the
Google Calendars, and talking about the
contributor
license it has in place. The framework itself also had another release - version 0.1.3
Also big news this month was the php|tek conference put on by php|architect. Many bloggers shared their experiences at the event including:
Davey Shafik, Scott Johnson and Ilia Alshanetsky. Other bloggers wrote from the other conference held this month,
PHP Quebec, such as Chris Shiflett and Andrei Zmievski.
And, of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention our little prank played on the community - a post joking that Zend was splitting off from
the PHP project.
May
Conferences were the big topic this month with some people in the community looking forward to events like the New York PHP Conference and
others looking back at php|tek. The
session list for the New York PHP Conference was posted, including many of the popular speakers and topics,
and the French PHP group in Paris issued their
Call for Papers for their upcoming Forum PHP conference in Paris. Several bloggers wrote more
about their experience at the php|tek conference including
Christian Wenz,
Davey Shafik,
Andrei Zmievski,
Chris
Shiflett, and even a podcast from the even from
Scott Johnson.
The latest version in the 5.1.x series was also released (5.1.3) but was quickly followed by another (5.1.4) to fix a large bug in the previous
edition. Filip de Waard posted a warning after the first release for developers to avoid using it until the update was posted.
Thankfully, the PHP team was quick in releasing the update.
June
By this month, the New York PHP Conference and Expo had wrapped up and bloggers around the community were
posting slides and talking about
their experiences. Another group, however, was looking forward to another event just starting out. The PHP Appalachia conference
was announced
and a reminder for registration was made later in the month. The event, similar to the other "camp" series found for other languages, was
a different kind of conference that took developers out of the conference halls and into the woods.
More information on php|works & db|works conference was also shared in the form of the speaker list being posted. The PHP Vikinger event got
off to a great start. Several releases and tutorials were posted including one that got a good bit of attention - a PHP script for decoding
CAPTCHA images. The Zend Framework release their latest version, 0.1.4, and Oracle released their "Underground PHP and Oracle Manual".
June was also the month that this site got its latest makeover. We decided to keep up to date with things in the community and move over from
our custom-made blogging application to a new system using the Zend Framework. This new backend also came with a new front end look and s more
back-to-basics approach of just providing the latest happenings in the PHP community. So far, the reaction's been great!
July
In July, OSCON got into full swing and several PHPers were in attendance. Included in those attending was one that got a bit more recognition
than he thought he would for some "playing cards" he created -
Cal Evans' OSCON trading cards. There was more framework talk this month
too with
Paul Jones' introduction to Solar and IBM developerWorks'
look at the Zend Framework.
It was also a sad day for the PHP group when one of the lead developers, Jani Taskinen, devided to leave the project. He posted his
thoughts and reasons to his blog and news of the event even reached the
Slashdot community.
Zend also announced that they are creating a version of their certification for PHP 5 that will be released soon.
August
August saw a lot of releases and not just from the PHP group. They advanced the language with many releases inclduing PHP
5.1.5,
5.1.6, 4.4.3,
and the release candidate for PHP 4.4.4RC1 posted for testing - followed soon by the final release of
PHP 4.4.4. Also released this month were
PEAR 1.4.11, Seagull 0.6.0, Solar 0.23.0, and the
Windows libraries for the PHP 4.4.3 and 4.4.3 series to work with MySQL.
Another hot topic this month was the interview of
Rasmus Lerdorf on the Floss Weekly podcast. Also, both the Tiobe.com and Nexen.net statistics show even more growth this month for PHP.
September
September was a month of updates on everything from conference news to software releases to new offerings from this site. This was the month
that we decided to start two things - the
"talks" page to try and keep track of all of the slides that have been posted for all of the
conferences happening and the job postings that are open to the public. The
job postings have been coming in and we've posted them up just as
soon as we've gotten them in an effort to share them quickly with the entire community.
The PHP Appalachia group announced their conference schedule (including plenty of time being outdoorsy) and some great topics. The PHP Weekender
announced that they officially had 50 people signed up for the event. With the php|works & db|works event completed, bloggers were posting
thier recaps of the event including the Zend Developer Zone, Christian Wenz, and Sebastian Bergmann.
Zend also announced the launch of their mailing lists for the Zend Framework as well as the release of a new version of the Zend Core for Oracle.
October
More conference news came up this month as "PHP conference season" continues on - everything from
PHPLondon, the Zend/PHP Conference, the
PHP Brasil Conference, the D.C. PHP Conference, and next year's php|tek conference.
There was big news on the Zend Framework front, not only that they released the next candidate - version 0.2.0 - but also that the project now has
a new leader. Due to health-related issues, Jayson Maynard was no longer able to head up the project, so Bill Karwin stepped in to
take the lead. He sent out an email to the Zend Framework mailing list to let everyone know who he was and where he wanted to take the project in the future.
Two other community events happened this month - Google released their "Code Search" functionality (and opened the code of applictions all over
the world to be searched - and possibly exploiting them. hooray for security!) and the PHP Women group launched in an effort to unify female PHP developers all over the world.
The PHP project moved forward on the mission towards PHP 5.2 with release canidates 5.2.0RC5 and RC6.
November
This month saw one of the most aniticipated PHP releases of the year -
PHP 5.2. This release also includes the
new filter extension to help even more with the protection of PHP applications and one of the keys to good coding - always filter input. ImprovedSource.com took a look at the
differences between this new release and the previous version (5.1).
The Zend/PHP Conference was also in the news, having just wrapped up at the beginning of the month and several people posted about it including
Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) posted his wrapup (including a mention of the deck of cards handed out) as well as many
others. There was even a video posted with a collage of photos taken at the event.
Other exciting releases were made this month too - Zend's Studio 5.5 universal binary and PHPUnit 3.0.
December
One of the big topics this month was the inclusion of taint functionality into the core of of PHP. Tobias Schlitt shared some comments
about it as well as the PHP 10.0 Blog and many others. Some people, like Sara Golemon, already started to look back at the year, giving
different perspectives on the happenings of the year.
PHP statistics were mentioned again this month, some from O'Reilly (PHP 5 adoption) and from DynamicWebPages. The Zend Framework also released their latest version, 0.6.0.
Well, that about wraps it up for 2006 - we know there's tons of topics that weren't mentioned but were just as important. If we mentioned all
of them, though, this post would take you hours to read. So, we've condensed it down and tried to provide links to just about everything. It
was a great year for PHP with tons of improvements, problems, and contributions from all over the world.
Here's to looking forward to a great 2007 and great things to come for everyone's favorite language!
