DevShed finishes off their series looking a private, public and protected variables and methods in classes with this final look a private methods in PHP5 object-oriented programming.

It's time to leap forward and tackle this final article of the series, which will be focused on covering some additional aspects concerning the use of this kind of class method. In addition, I'll teach you how to utilize the "final" keyword, which is included with PHP 5, to prevent the methods of a specific class from being overridden by any subclass.

They work from a hands-on example to show how they can work with private methods (expanding a bit from last time) and how to use the "final" keyword to restrict any and all modification for a method.

Lukas Smith has posted a "stream dump" of some of the thoughts he's had lately about the status of the emPHPower project including its organization and the potential popularity of the group.

I think the general idea of establishing a communication hub for core developers, end users and companies has been received with sufficient enthusiasm to start working on some of the boring details. The next logical step seems to be to start to fleshing out how the organization behind this communication hub should be structured. I want to leave as much power as possible with the individual members, which is one of the main reasons why I do not want companies to be come members.

He focuses on what he calls the "bootstrapping process" - the formation of the initial core group, opening the organization up for signups from the community, the creation of a constitution and the role of the core PHP developers in the group.

The PEAR blog has posted the offical results of this year's elections:

Elections are now over and a new PEAR Group has been formed. Just like last year and always following the Constitution, the new members have been elected by a secret ballot of PEAR Developers.

Those elected include Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Chuck Bugress and Travis Swicegood. This year's President id David Coallier. You can find out more on the PEAR website page for the elections.

DevShed continues their series looking at variable scoping in PHP5 classes with this new look at using the public and protected keywords to "restrict member visibility".

Now that you know what will be treated in this fourth chapter of the series, it's time to learn how to declare and implement public and protected methods with PHP 5 classes. Of course, as always I'm going to address this useful topic by using a hands-on approach, which means that there's a bunch of code samples ahead, waiting patiently for you.

They talk about calling methods globally first and then move into the keyword restrictions. They show the difference between a public method/variable and a protected one, including how to get at the protected members from a child class.

DevShed continues their look at the use of the member visibility functionality PHP5 offers in its classes with this new part of the series, a look at the private property.

One of the most useful features that was introduced into the improved object model of PHP 5 is "member visibility." It provides PHP developers with the ability to specify the level of access each data member of a class will have in the context of a given application.

They review the other two keywords (public/protected) before venturing on to the use of "private" to protect, but allow access to, methods and properties in a parent class.

In a moment of divine inspiration (well, at least a thought that passed through his head at the bus stop), Lukas Smith has thought up and is proposing a group to help promote and advocate PHP, one he calls emPHPower.

emPHPower should be a mediator between various (potential) participants in the PHP world. As such emPHPower could serve as a mediator between the PHP.net developers and its user base, between corporations and PHP.net, between corporations and grass roots organizers etc. [...] There are is fundamental concept that I see in this vision: emPHPower is a mediator and catalyst that empowers members of the community to follow their own ideas.

He talks more about the actual "doing" of his ideas and mentions things like the project's budget and where it would come from - the possibility of member fees (based somehow on cost of living).

As posted about on his blog today, David Coallier and others have been voted into the new PEAR group's team:

I would like to say thanks to everyone who has voted for both the rest of the Team, and I :-). So the new PEAR Group team is built of the following members: Martin Jansen, Arnaud Limbourg, Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Helgi Thormar, Paul M. Jones, Justin Patrin and finally myself David Coallier.

Team, here we go, let's get some good and solid work done! I am looking forward for such cooperation with both PEAR contributors and other frameworks out there!

He also includes a lengthy listing of some of his personal work for the upcoming months, including work on several of the PEAR pcakges - MDB2, Text_CAPTCHA_Numeral, pearweb (the PEAR website), Image_Transform, and HTML_AJAX.

DevShed is finishing off their series on using static members and methods in PHP5 with this new tutorial covering the creation of output as pulled from a MySQL database using these static members/methods.

Welcome to the last part of the series "Using static members and methods in PHP 5." Made up of two instructive chapters, this series introduces the foundations of using static members and defines static methods in PHP 5-driven development environments.

Since in the first tutorial you were provided with a couple of concrete cases where a class used a static property, as well as one static method (remember the definition of the Singleton class), in this tutorial you'll see another example where these kinds of methods and members are properly utilized.

They give a class to help interface directly with MySQL before getting into the three bits of functionality that make the output possible - ResultToString, ResultToXML, ResultToArray. Finally, they combine the pieces together, making a Factory class that handles the request and pushes the correct output format back out the other side.

DevShed has posted the first part of a two part series today looking at the use of static members and methods in classes in your PHP5 scripts.

Static properties and methods can be quite useful in a range of situations, not merely for constructing a Singleton class. This article, the first in a two-part series, introduces the basic concepts of static properties and methods, using plenty of hands-on examples.

Hopefully, by the end of this series you should be equipped with a decent knowledge of how to include static members and methods within your PHP applications with minor difficulties.

They start with a simple example of using both in a class before moving on to using the Singleton pattern working up to making a Factory for creating static objects.

On SomeCoders.com today, they've posted part two in their "Member Managment System Using PHP, AJAX, and script.aculo.us" article series. In this new episode, they continue on from part one and use the handler script and login page from it to work up the new pieces of the puzzle.

Just like last time, they give you all the code you'll need and explain how it works following each step. Again, the code is largely procedural, but it does what it needs to do and is accessible to even those that haven't gotten to work with objects in PHP yet.