With the successful relaunch of the PHPFreaks.com website recently, Daniel Egeberg wanted to share a little glimpse behind the work that it took to get to that place. In this new blog entry, he talks about the technology, code and design aspects they worked through.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

The IBM developerWorks website has a new article/tutorial posted today about the new features and functionality that's included with the latest release of the Zend Framework, version 1.5.

The popular open source Zend Framework just got some slick enhancements. Learn what's new in V1.5 and how upgrades, including Zend_Form, Zend_Layout, and Zend_View, enhanced support for GData Web services, and improved Ajax support can help PHP developers easily roll out cutting-edge Web applications.

They walk through each of the new components (or features in them) like Zend_Form and Zend_Layout/Zend_View with examples included. There's also mention of other miscellaneous updates like the addition of OpenID and InfoCard support, a LDAP authentication module and an interface with Google's GData service.

In this new blog post today, Lars Strojny talks about a new magic constant that will be joining its brothers in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release - __DIR__.

In PHP 5.3 there will be another magic constant __DIR__. [...] To allow this, the internal function php_dirname() has been moved in the Zend Engine and is now called zend_dirname(). Nevertheless an alias still exists.

__DIR__ will join the other constants (like __LINE__ and __FUNCTION__) to help give the currently running script a little introspection for things like its filename, what class it's currently in and now, what directory the file currently lives in.

Gergely Hodicska has posted part four of his "what's new in PHP 5.3" series - a sort of "wrapup" for some of the smaller features that have been added. Among them are:

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

php|architect has officially launched some new training course offering to help PHP developers expand their knowledge of both the language and the tools they can use to develop it with.

php|architect is proud to announce the addition of two new live, instructor-led training courses to our online training lineup.

The two new courses are:

• Building Rich Internet Applications With PHP 5 and AJAX
• Web Development with Komodo IDE

Both offer up different experiences - the Ajax course focusing on the use of the Yahoo! UI library and the Komodo course focusing on the use of the software application, the Komodo IDE.

Paul Jones has announced two new things pertaining to the Solar framework today - the release of a new versions and the launch of a new website.

The first new release of Solar in three months, version 0.26.0 alpha, has arrived! There are over 150 separate changes and improvements noted in the change log.

In conjunction with the new release, we have a brand new website. The site design is from Matt Brett, the CSS and hosting are courtesy of Clay Loveless, and the logo was designed by Ben Carter.

Changes in the latest release of the framework include:

• a move from the Facade pattern to the Factory pattern
• front-controller and page-controller now support automatic discovery of alternative output formats
• Solar_Sql has a lot of little improvements
• a new data filter class

Check out the blog entry for the full release notes or just hop on over to the site and pick up this latest edition.

Pierre-Alain Joye has posted about some long-awaited features that he's added to his zip PECL package:

After a relatively long period without features addition, I feel like it is time to add some long awaited features to zip.

The features added are:

• Glob and pattern support - now possible to add files using a glob pattern syntax or regexp (pcre based)
• getStatusString - returns the error message containing the system/zlib or zip error, handy while debugging

These features are still just in the alpha release, but he's included some code to help you become familiar with their functionality already - one using glob, the other the regular expression.

Giving it a second shot, Edin Kadribasic has posted another build using the new compiler from Microsoft because of some issues with the first one.

Well the first build proved to be somewhat less that a full success. It worked only on one computer: the one that was build on. Since this limits PHP use on the Windows platform I went ahead and read about Microsoft manifest files, SxS (side by side) assemblies and other wonderful stuff that Microsoft has provided for us in version 2005 of their development package.

The new build should be installable without any libraries from Microsoft and you can grab both of them directly from his site:

• php-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip
• pecl-5.2.1RC2-dev-Win32.zip

In this new tutorial from WebReference, they show you how to develop a simple database-enabled Ajax application in PHP.

In this article you'll learn how to create database-enabled Ajax requests using PHP and MySQL. We begin by creating the front-end HTML and JavaScript files used to make requests to the server-side. The requested server-side is a PHP file which bridges the gap between Ajax and a PHP object that connects to a MySQL database and returns results as an XML response to the Ajax engine.

The application is a simple way to enter news postings into a database and pull them back out with this handy Javascript functionality. They also provide the complete source code for download to help you get started.

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!