The team that has brought you the infamous PHP ElePHPants in the past is back with another round - the 6th generation of the cuddly PHP mascot in both traditional blue and pink.

April 19, 2011 PHPère is happy to show you the first pictures of two premature elePHPant the 6th generation of PHP. As you can see ... ElePHPant the blue, is in great shape and has found its new home very pleasant

These are shots of the first turnouts of this latest batch and the rest will follow in June/July of this year. Those that have already ordered them will be contacted soon and, if you're interested in picking up some of your own, send them an email for complete instructions.

If you've been trying to get your hands on one of the cuddly little mascots for PHP (the elePHPant) but haven't managed to yet, there's some good news! Another run of the fuzzy little animals is being done (the 6th) and this time they're offering something new - pink elePHPants.

As we are now out of every of the 5 first generation of the elephpants, it is time to start a 6th. You'll find here all information to include yourself. [...] Fill in your elephpants wishes. We do not need any payement now. We will contact you directly before starting the generation for the actual payement.

Their schedule hopes to end the pre-order process on December 20th (just three days away) and to strat production on these pre-orders by January 10th. The end results would be shipped out for delivery in April 2011. If you'd like to lay claim to some of your own, go over to the order form and select the size (large/small) and the color (blue/pink) and fill in the contact info. Unfortunately, because of production restrictions, single elePHPants cannot be ordered, so consider getting together with a local user group and all chipping in for a box!

New on his blog today, Simon Jones has posted a handy guide for those using the Zend Framework out there to the stack index for plugins the framework uses.

Zend Framework Controller plugins are a powerful way to inject logic into your controller system at various points, such as before and after an action dispatch. Plugins are run in the order they are added, though it is possible to change the order by defining a custom stack index. ZF internal plugins such as Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler, which displays a nice Error 404 page, has a stack index of 999 to ensure it runs at the end of any plugin cycle. However, it's not so obvious from the ZF manual how to set a custom stack index.

He shows how to use the second parameter of registering a plugin to define the stack level and how to get the listing of the current stack to see just where yours might need to be placed. He also includes code samples and an output example of the default Zend Framework stack.

Just in time for the holidays the PHP Women have released a calendar for the new year (2010) featuring photos of several of the founders and leaders in the group (as taken at php|tek 2009).

The rumours have been flying around for a while, and we even dropped some hints; since its December it is time for us to confirm that there is a PHPWomen Calendar available for 2010, and it is now on sale. It features our charter members dressed as the beautiful women they are, with a guest appearance by our booth babes.

You can check out the calendar over on Zazzle and pick up a copy of your own for prices between $24 and $30 USD (depending on the size ordered). Ten percent of each purchase goes directly back to the PHP Women organization where it will be used for their many programs (like mentoring and other programs to help out women in the PHP community).

On the ProDevTips blog today Henrik describes a situation where he "tried to be clever" with the array_map and array_filter functions and some of the confusion in their usage.

I knew array_filter existed and what it was all about since before, however I started working with something requiring array_map first, all well and OK, array_map looks like this: array_map('callback', Array). So then I assumed I could use array_filter in the same fashion, big mistake.

He was caught by the parameter order difference between the two and problems with how the callbacks worked. In the end, he he spent an hour to create a function to search an array for a partial match and didn't even end up using the array functions (opting for calls to stripos instead).

Matthew Turland has posted the latest article in his series on the Magento e-commerce platform. He's been talking an in-depth look at the features of the application and reporting his findings in a series of blog posts. This time he focuses on the order management features.

He lists out the seven main parts of this feature, describing each (with links to the Magento manual for some):

• View, Edit, Create, and Fulfill Orders from Admin Panel
• Create Multiple Invoices, Shipments, and Credit Memos Per Order for Split Fulfillment
• Print Invoices and Packing Slips
• Call Center Order Creation
• Create Re-orders for Customers from Administration Panel
• E-mail Notifications of Orders
• RSS Feed of New Orders

He also briefly mentions a test he performed with the Opera browser versus Firefox in working with his Magento install. A bug causing sporadic crashes in Firefox was nowhere to be seen in Opera - though there was an issue with cookie propagation.

The Ask About PHP blog has a tutorial offering CodeIgniter users an alternative to the "no normal GET variables allowed" restriction the framework puts on its URLs - a hack to add those GET values back in as a configuration item.

Codeigniter does allow you to turn on the querystring capability, but that would mean you have to use a pure querystring approach, foregoing the segment-based approached. So, is it possible to mix segments and querystring?

Because of how the segmenting URLs are handled, the order of the parameters is very important as they're passed directly into the controller that way. By bypassing this structure and grabbing the GET variables out of a constant in one of the configuration files in one of two ways - mixing them globally and mixing them locally.

On the CodeDiesel.com blog today Sameer has posted a quick code snippet that lets you see if a numeric array is already ordered correctly (useful for something like unit testing).

I recently wrote a quick code to find if a numeric array is ordered i.e sorted in a ascending or descending order. I needed it to check a sort algorithm I had written. The problem is that the following code has a worst-case running time of O(N).

He includes the forty-five line function that takes in the array and the sort order it should match. The code then loops around through them checking the value against an incrementing local variable. Also included is an example of its use in a unit test, passing it into an assertEquals for a PHPunit test to check the given array.

As a new meme was launched at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and, while it's not directly related to PHP, it was still very warmly accepted by the community - Christian Flickinger's "Fails" logos (see here). He's written up a post about it for his blog too:

So, a week before PHP|TEK 2008 I came up with the genius idea to take the Ruby on Rails logo, which is protected against re-use (hahaha), and parody it. I wanted to express my views of Ruby on Rails (though never have using RoR) through this modification.

I took the logo and simply changed the "R" to an "F" using a font that was almost identical to the original.

You can ask anyone that was at ZendCon this year about them - they were everywhere. Christian did a great job on a simple parody that shares the sentiment of many members of the PHP community (and others outside I'm sure). He has them for sale on his etsy shop if you'd like to pick up some of your own.

So you've seen all of the pictures of the elePHPants floating around and want to get your hands on one of your very own? Good news! Damien Seguy and crew have another fresh batch of huggable blue PHPness on the way and you can place your order now:

If you have missed the boat of the first generation of elePHPants, now is the right time to catchup up and participate to the 2008 generation! As for the first generation, this project is open to every PHP User group and aficionados, that want to adopt elePHPants, small or big.

Pricing is 4 Euros per elephant (in a 50 count box only) or 50 Euro for one of the larger elephants. They're even open to having company logos ("your own brood") added to the other side of his back. You can find more details on getting your hands on one at this page on the Nexen.net website or just head right to the order form to get a little blue PHPer to call your own.