In a recent entry to his blog Andy Jeffries gives an overview of his site's transition over from one framework to another - away from Symfony and over to Rails.

I decided as I was learning/using Symfony at my contract at the time that it would be a good experiment to write it in Symfony. [...] The site did fairly well when I posted but I still posted in frequently.

After redefining the site's purpose a bit, he reconsidered the language (and framework) choice and decided to do a rewrite in Rails. He gives a comparison of the process on things like lines of code, time to build, performance differences, deployment and automated testing.

Some unfortunate news today - Greg Beaver, maintainer of the pear.chiaraquartet.net PEAR channel server has fallen on some bad luck. Some how, the entire database for it was wiped out and Greg can't quite figure out when/how.

Somehow, I managed to erase the entirety of pear.chiaraquartet.net's database, although I have no idea how or when. In other words, all developers, release history, packages were wiped. Needless to say, I am a wee bit pissed off. Until I can find a decent backup, I will reconstruct the entire thing from scratch.

If you have any information that would help him rebuild this resource, please let him know - I know he'll appreciate it.

Brett Zamir has some suggestions for the PHP documentation group in his new post on the Zend Developer Network.

The folks working on the official PHP Documentation have done a marvellous job in providing a mostly easy to follow documentation, with good examples. However, as with anything, there can still be some improvement. I see two shortcomings and these have to do with structure rather than content, and I think the community can help solve them.

There's two things he suggests can be done to help refine the documentation process, including a move into a more wiki-style environment (with the content under a fully open license). Specifically, he suggests making a move to Wikibooks to encourage more participation from the PHP community.