One of the more popular PHP community sites out there, PHPFreaks, has launched the completely reworked version of their site:

Recently there have been many changes to PHP Freaks. A significant change is the total rewrite and redesign of the main site. The old one was taken down after vulnerabilities were found in the source code. For the last couple of months we have been working on making what you are currently looking at now. The release has been postponed a couple of times, but people have been patiently waiting for the site.

They've added a blog to the mix (which this post is a part of) to help keep visitors up to date on the site's happenings and various other news from the admins. If you find a bug, let them know, otherwise - enjoy the new site and check out all of the same great content.

Ken Guest has a quick note about another "planet" site that's been started up for the PHP community - Planet.php.ie:

After a bit of discussion on the php.ie mailing list, Kae Verens and David Coallier set up http://planet.php.ie to bundle together blog postings from people within the Irish PHP community - a big thank you is deserved for them.

There's currently five bloggers added to the planet so if you'd like to be added, either contact Ken or Kae.

As anyone who's been developing applications (web or otherwise) knows, there are certain things that you just don't do when you're doing things like adding features or changing the code of a production application. There are some general rules to follow and this new article on the PHPClasses.org website reminds us of just a few.

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

Included in his list are things like:

• Handle unexpected conditions Test your code
• Monitor your site errors and act upon them
• Do not disclose errors to the users
• Do what you can as you can never get defensive enough

He also recommends two resources for some additional reading - the Wikipedia entry for "defensive programming" and a chapter from Getting Real (from 37 Signals) about how to "Get Defensive".

Frédéric G. Marand has pointed us to a great community site for those out there working with or interested in the PHP-GTK project - PHP-GTK.eu.

The site features original articles entirely devoted to that extension of PHP, and theses receives new articles on an almost daily basis: tips, code fragments, application examples...

Some of the latest articles posted include:

• Extending GtkDrawingArea to draw animated graphs
• Extending GtkMenu class for Popup menu dialog
• GtkEntryCompletion
• Editable cells within GtkTreeView

There's tons of great information in all sections of the site so if PHP-GTK's what your into, you definitely need to check out the PHP-GTK Community Site.

The Hardened-PHP project has released another vulnerability today, this time for the popular phpMyAdmin database management package concerning an issue with the "error.php" file being open to an XSS vulnerability.

It was discovered that phpMyAdmin comes with a script to display error messages that supports displaying the error in a user supplied charset. Unfortunately the encoding of the error message is not taking the charset into account which can result into XSS when UTF-7 is selected. (Other charsets like US-ASCII can also be used to exploit this in some browsers.)

There is no proof of concept posted for this exploit and, since it only effects phpMyAdmin versions 2.9.0.2 and lower, it's suggested that you update to the latest release as soon as possible to correct the issue.

Joshua Eichorn posts a quick note today concerning the source code for his upcoming "Understanding Ajax" book (from Prentice Hall Publishing).

All the code shown in Understanding AJAX is now available from understandingajax.net. You can run the examples on my server or download them and set them up on your own. If you run into any problems leave a comment on this post.

The book's site provdes each chapter (two through twelve) in zip files for easy download as well as a single zip file download if you just want them all at once.

Ryan Malesevich continues his series looking at some of the WordPress plugins he's foun duseful in his development work. This time he looks at a feature to make it easier for people to submit your post to the popular social networking sites of today (such as digg, furl, del.icio.us, etc) - WP-Notable.

What WP-Notable does is it allows you to include icons and links to where users can submit your site to the different websites, 15 of them to be exact. The 15 are: del.icio.us, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, yahoo, smarkling, magnolia, and segnalo.

I'll be honest, most of those I have never heard of, but it can't hurt to have those options to your visitors who have heard of them and are using it. To see an example of WP-Notable in work, just go to any article and underneath it you'll see the 15 icons with shortcuts to submit that article to those services.

The installation of the plugin is as simple as uploading and activiating, and Ryan includes a sample usage to integrate into your page.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll today, asking the question "what's the best way to speed up your site?"

Options included:

• Reduce overall latency by reducing HTTP requests
• Save your images properly
• Strip extraneous PHP calls

With the option of "Miscellaneous thoughts" coming in at the number one place. The next step down was a tie between "Save your images properly" and "Reduce overall latency by reducing HTTP requests" with "Compression" following close behind.

Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll asking "What is the Top Criterion for Scaling PHP?"

For anyone interested in getting their blog listed on the Planet-PHP site, you might want to check out this new blog entry from Helgi Þormar for a few changes going on over there.

Been a while since I blogged but here I go, I'm now one of the people that handles the blog accept/reject on Planet-PHP and as is Pierre in addition to Toby and Christian S.

One exciting thing has already happened to Planet-PHP since I joined, Christian Stocker added a new way to submit your blog to Planet-PHP instead of the old and somewhat crude way of sending email.

This simple new method (and one that's easier for them to track) is just this email form asking for your name, email, the blog URL, and the RSS/Atom URL - oh, and, of course, why your blog should be included in the "Planet-PHP Family".

Paul Stamatiou shares with us today five ways to speed up your site, some quick and easy recommendations to making your site fly.

Throughout the blogosphere I'm always seeing these blogs, that while they look great, are horribly slow and overburdened. Over the past few months I have become somewhat of a website optimization specialist, bringing my own site from an over 250kB homepage to its current 34kB.

I will help you achieve some of the same success with a few, powerful tips. Most of these are common sense, but I can't stress their importance enough. I will concentrate on the website and not the server in this article, as there are too many things to discuss when it comes to server optimization.

The five tips mentioned include "Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests" and "Compression", each with a paragraph or so of explaination as to what it is and how to implement it. There's even a PHP-specific one that talks about a paring down of the bits of functionality that really aren't needed.