The PHP group has made a two quick updates to the recent release of PHP 5.2.6 for the Windows users out there:

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).

The main PHP.net website has posted a list of people participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project on various PHP projects. These include:

• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

You can check out more information on the projects (including links to their individual pages) on this page of the Google Code website.

With a comeback from the eight reasons not to write for the PHP manual, Philip Olson has made his own post with a few of his own reasons why you should.

How do we appropriately credit the kind souls who seemingly work anonymously within the php.net CVS repository? Not sure, but here are about 8 reasons why you should write for the official PHP manual.

Among the items on his list (longer than eight reasons) are things like "You'll own a cool @php.net email address", "You'll gain experience using DocBook and the related tools to create documentation", "You'll make new friends" and "You'll help make something better, something you use. It's good to use things that get better, right?"

Check out his full post for the rest of his reasons.

Hannes Magnusson has posted about more updates that are being made to the PHP.net website today, including an upgrade to the "conference teaser" patch and the introduction of a new box to like directly to the latest releases on the front page.

Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...

What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?

He wants your feedback on this last point - would having an XML feed for just the version info be that useful? Or would it just be yet another RSS feed to add to the list to keep up with the new PHP releases?

Courtesy of an update to this post on the Zend Develoer Zone site, there's a bit more detail from Hannes Magnusson, himself (the developer behind the recent changes to the PHP.net website) in a new blog post on his site.

As many of you know I changed the frontpage of php.net recently by moving conference announcements and call for papers to its own dedicated page in a desperate attempt to regain the control of our frontpage.

The rest of the post discusses the points of "why?", "regain control?", "what gave you the right?" and even links to a patch that puts a "conference teaser" back on the page (near the top).

The #php.thinktank channel on the Freenode IRC network has started their talk series with two new topics, the logs for which have been posted to the thinktank website.

The two topics so far have been:

• SLP by Davey Shafik
• php.NET (phalanger) by zaemis