With PHP4 out of the way, it's time to make way for PHP5. To get the ball rolling, Gennady Feldman has posted some links to PHP5 resources that can get you on your way.

After posting previous item on the end of PHP4 I thought it would be beneficial to put up a number of pointers for those who are still using PHP4 and are looking for information that will ease the pain of migration to PHP5.

Links include:

• http://www.php5.org/
• Why are you not using PHP 5
• Migration to PHP5

According to a new press release from Zend, they've expanded their training course line to include a few more topics - migration from PHP4 to PHP5 and an in-depth look at their Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE.

These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

Here's the details:

• Migrating Your Web Applications from PHP v4 to v5 - This webinar guides you through the basics of planning a migration, as well as discussing some of the tools to make the process easier, such as unit testing and PHPDoc. The current class will be held September 9th and 11th and will cost about $300 USD.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The Zend Studio for Eclipse Course is designed to provide PHP programmers with a practical, in-depth knowledge of the next generation tool in the Zend Studio IDE family. The current class will start August 25th and will run through September 5th. Cost for the class is about $800 USD.

Stefan Priebsch has posted about the official release of his book, one of the latest from php|architect press - "php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration".

Thanks to the hard work of Elizabeth, Marco, and all the others at php|architect, my new book, php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration has been released.

The book aims to be the only one you'll need when it comes to guiding you and your applications from the PHP4 dark ages up to the world of PHP5. You can order your copy directly from php|architect - the Print/PDF combo for about $33 CAD and the PDF only for around $30 CAD.

On the Debuggable blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted some code (thought up by Marc Grabaniski) to go through Google and find the pages that they have indexed for your site. Their goal is to check and see if the migration of a site was successful.

Just get a list of all pages google has indexed from your site and then use that as your basis for checking if your migration worked or not. This is very convenient because you do not have to know all your own urls yourself, and you'll only get the relevant ones (if they are not in google they are unlikely to have traffic).

The code is included as well as an example usage. He also points out FixtureShell for more command-line CakePHP examples.

MTA publishing (php|architect) has released another new book - Stefan Priebsch's "Guide to PHP 5 Migration":

Written by Stefan Priebsch, this is the only book you will need to help you through the rough spots when migrating your PHP apps from PHP4 to PHP5. Not only is this an extremely comprehensive and in-depth resource, it will show you virtually every pitfall you may encounter and will undoubtedly make your migration as smooth as possible.

The book covers things like the concepts surrounding migration, some strategies to follow and an outline of a recommended migration process (as well as some tools to help). You can find out more about this new book on its page on the php|architect website and order your own copy - $33 CAD for the print and PDF versions together and just $29 CAD for the PDF only.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article that supplements a podcast from the PHP Abstract series recently given by Lorna Mitchell on "Data Importing".

It is a simple walkthrough of some examples of the techniques mentioned in the podcast. It is much easier to visualise queries and data structures if written down, so here we look at an example of each of the points mentioned.

Her examples convert employee information over from one table to another via some SQL queries and splits out the information into the parts to fill the table (done with inserts and updates).

There's a new article on the Zend Developer Zone today about the conversion of CakePHP information (via migrations) from a database over to a WAML format.

Today we will talk about migrations, yaml files and CakePHP and in particular I'll introduce you to the latest shell I've written for CakePHP: YAMMY! I've written YAMMY! a couple of weeks ago, but I just found the time to release it today. Anyway lets get into more details!

The author, Daniel Vecchiato, first explains what migrations are and how they relate to database tables (like revision control - sort of). A previous project made it possible to do migrations in CakePHP, but it lacked what he calls the "right food" to get it working as well as it could. That's where YAMMY! comes in - by answering a few simple questions, you can set up a YAML record of your database tables and make it simple to integrate into your application's development process.

Ivo Jansch has posted a reminder about a webinar he's going to be hosting for Zend about taking the leap to move from PHP4 to a PHP5 production environment.

Tomorrow I'm doing a webinar for Zend: I will be talking about migrating from PHP4 to PHP5. I won't go into the technical details so much, but I will talk about why to migrate and how to migrate. I will talk about both the benefits and the risks.

If you'd like to sign up, check out Zend's webinars page and enroll in the "PHP4 to PHP5 Migration" event. It happens Wednesday, Oct 24th at 9am Pacific (PDT) and will last about one hour.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted about some of their (Zend's) upcoming webcasts/webinars for the next two months:

On a regular basis, Zend hosts free Webinars on a variety of Zend and PHP related topics. They keep a lost of them over at the Zend site but occasionally, I like to list them here to make sure all DevZone readers are aware of them.

The list includes:

• Zend Studio Neon Beta Overview (Oct 17)
• PHP4 to PHP5 Migration (Oct 24)
• Zend Framework Database Access (Oct 31)
• Improve your PHP Application's Search Capabilities with Lucene (Nov 7)
• Building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with PHP and Zend Framework (Nov 14)
• PHP Security Basics (Nov 28)

Both the pages for each of the webinars and the Zend Developer Zone post have summaries of what each is about.

Cody Caughlan has created a project that brings one of the popular features of Ruby on Rails to the world of PHP5 - database migrations.

One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of "migrations" for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers. [...] Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.

His framework, Ruckusing Migrations, is a modular framework that makes use of some of the more advanced features of PHP5. It's portable (via an adapter interface) and uses a generic task interface (task files) to load functionality into the framework. There's also plenty of API hooks to allow for a developer to easily create their own custom operations.

Check out the project homepage for more information.