The Symfony project's blog has a new post today about a big move that one of its resources it making - the framework's plugins are getting their own section.

I am pretty happy to announce that I have just deployed a new version of the symfony project website with a brand new "Plugins" section (look at the top menu entries) to replace the Trac plugin management system.

The new section has a listing of all of the available plugins (can be filtered) and dedicated pages for each of them with things like license, version and release information. You can also search the plugins based on keywords and authors. Developers adding their plugins have a full admin interface and uses the Trac accounts to manage access.

On the Ibuildings blogs, there's a new post from Stefan Koopmanschap taking a look at the latest major release of the Symfony PHP framework (v1.1) and some of the functionality it includes.

The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.

He looks at the new architecture of the framework, how it now handles forms, the improvements to the plugin system and the (partial) integration of the Propel ORM layer for accessing databases. The full listing of updates can be found here.

The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post full of links to some great add-ons for the popular WordPress blogging software to help make your site into more of a community.

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here's fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

Some of the packages they link to include Ajaxd WordPress, Profiles, Quick SMS, Invite Friends and SezWho.

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post that overviews the plugin system that the Symfony framework has to offer.

If you want to use the power of the Rails framework without having to learn Ruby, then Symfony is the right framework for you. After spending more than 10 months playing around with Rails, I can say that Symfony is a great alternative to Rails for programmers who already know PHP.

He talks about what a plugin is, how its used by the framework, the simple installation process and a "top ten" list of some of the most popular plugins (including sfGuardPlugin, sfSimpleForm and sfControlPanel).

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial (login required) showing how to use the Eclipse PDT functionality to debug scripts your PHP development.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

You'll need to have a machine with PHP, Eclipse, Apache and the PHP Development Tools already installed to follow along (as well as a trial version of the Zend Studio Web Debugger). They also include the methods for setting up XDebug as the debugger.

A new post over on the Symfony blog today show how to combine the framework with the Propel templating system thanks to some new enhancements.

Starting with symfony 1.1, it is now possible to easily use Propel 1.3 in your project to take advantage of its speed improvements, nested set implementation, object instance pooling, among others. Most importantly, Propel 1.3 uses PDO instead of Creole as the DBAL, offering a significant performance boost.

There's a few steps to getting everything all set up, but they're pretty simple. First, you'll need to grab the right plugin from the Symfony repository, then you change the yml file configuration for the PDO connection, change a few settings in your propel.ini and clear the cache and rebuild the models - you're all set! (Complete commands and example configurations are included)

If you're a MediaWiki user, the PHP::Impact blog has a list of twenty extensions you don't want to miss out on:

MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture. The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time.

Plugins included in the list are things like:

• SimpleFeed
• Tasks
• CheckUser
• SyntaxHighlight GeSHi

Check out the full list for more great plugins.

If you're a WordPress user and are in the process of an upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5, you might be having a few issues. One problem can be cause by the wp-cache component and this recent post from Shantanu Goel.

The issues range from weird page layouts, to some controls not working, to some errors popping up here and there, and probably your blog not even displaying. This occurs because even though WordPress is PHP5 compatible, some of the plugins you are using might not be.

In his case, it was the wp-cache plugin that was causing the problems. Permissions weren't right to allow it to do its job. This resulted in problems rendering content and with the site acting as it normally would. His solution involved disabling and reenabling the plugin after deleting the cache and lock file the plugin uses.

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

The Symfony project is recommending you upgrade your plugins to the latest editions - an issue with the PEAR channel caused it to load the wrong ones:

A problem in the symfony project PEAR channel made the plugin-install task always install the oldest version of the plugins, instead of the latest. If you recently installed plugins with the symfony command line, you probably installed an outdated version. Plugins installed via SVN are not affected.

You'll need to run a plugin-upgrade command for each of the plugins installed on your system to ensure that you're completely up to date. The post has complete info on how to tell which plugins you have and the exact commands to issue to being them up to date.