On the Ibuildings blog today Mikko Koppanen talks a bit about Open Source software projects and things that can help to make them successful.

An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right?

He recommends a team infrastructure growth as the application grows and the importance of documentation and maintenance after the project has been launched.

On the Builder.com.au site today, there's an introduction posted to walk you through one of the most popular web-based database administration tools for PHP/MySQL on the web, phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin is a HTML interface developed in PHP, for creating and managing MySQL databases. Before you download and install the latest version, have a look at the requirements section on the phpMyAdmin Wiki.

They look at the overall interface, how to set up users, making a new database, creating a table inside of it, pushing data into the table and the various options that the tool has to help you manage your database(s) - all with nice big screenshots to show you where it all is.

The WordPress blog has posted a sneak peek of the upcoming release of the popular blogging tool - WordPress 2.5.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It's been in the oven for a while, and we're finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

They look at each of these - the new Dashboard, updates to the Write page and the changes to the Manage page. If you want to get a jump on the action before the stable release, go grab the latest Release Candidate and get going.

The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new post from Matthew Magain spotlighting the release of the latest version of one of the more popular PHP CMS systems out there - Drupal 6.

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

DevShed has posted the next-to-last (part four) of their series looking at destructors in PHP5 applications today. This time they focus on passing information back out of the destructors as the script is finishing.

In this fourth article of the series I'm going to teach you how perform this process when working with multiple objects (remember that you already learned how to achieve this using only one class instance).

They start simple, showing how to handle one object to give you a base to work from. They modify this to expand it out and show the management instead of three different user data objects.

Sandro Groganz has posted his review of the recent Packt Publishing release Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects.

Wise man are rare, but they exist and one of them is happy to share his wisdom with all tense CMS consultants and project managers to help them relax. [...] In fact, this book is a tremendous work of reference for any kind of CMS project, be it eZ Publish or not, proprietary or Open Source. Only two of 13 chapters actually deal with eZ Publish specifics.

He covers the contents of the book - code examples, howtos, training, risk management - and its unique combination of tips and tricks with quotes from experienced managers.

Knut Urdalen has written up a book review of a new release from the Packt Publishing folks - "Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects" by Matrin Bauer.

I just went through it and this is the first book ever written about managing content management projects in general and using eZ Publish in particular. There's a lot of technical documentation and end user documentation about eZ Publish, but there has not been any documentation for project managers besides the more general project management literature.

He talks about the contents of the book - information on the phases of a project life cycle - and the level of technical knowledge that's required to understand it. He condones the book and recommends it specifically to project managers looking to get a bit more insight into what's happening with their eZ Publish projects.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted about a quick little application today - MkDevDVD - a DVD manager for Linux.

MkDevDVD is a /dev/dvd manager for Linux, which in itself does not sound too exciting. It allows you to quickly switch /dev/dvd between a symbolic link to your CDROM device, or mount a DVD ISO so that media players like Xine and Mplayer work correctly when looking up your DVD.

The application is currently in release 1.0 and can be downloaded directly here or you an get more information about it and how to install it from the project's homepage.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest reader poll for the week. The question they posed to visitors of their site asked about their favorite FAQ manager from those on the list:

• phpMyFAQ
• ODFaq
• Lethal Penguin's FAQMasterFlex
• All
• None

The result was a resounding 60% for the first on the list - phpMyFAQ. Next down in ranking was the "None" option, making phpMyFAQ the undisputed champ for FAQ management in PHP (well, at least for this poll).

Be sure to check out this week's poll that asks which of the four options is the most common perspective regarding objects in PHP.

Hot on the heels of this announcement, Andi Gutmans has posted some of his thoughts on this new functionality and how it can help companies both large and small (he mentions specifically Yahoo! of course).

In my experience, databases have had a long history of being the typical bottleneck in PHP applications. There are many reasons for that.

His reasons include the fact that web apps being heavily database driven, PHP developers would rather write PHP than SQL, and that there's a lack of good, cheap tools to help find these bottlenecks. What he focuses on most, though, is the overhead caused by the need for multi-process environments to force each process to manage their own connections to the databse.

He talks about some stats on average connections and application speed, about efforts IBM has made to help the situation, and how it's not necessarily just the server's fault for delegating out the database resources - why can't they all adapt?