On the Debuggable blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted some code (thought up by Marc Grabaniski) to go through Google and find the pages that they have indexed for your site. Their goal is to check and see if the migration of a site was successful.

Just get a list of all pages google has indexed from your site and then use that as your basis for checking if your migration worked or not. This is very convenient because you do not have to know all your own urls yourself, and you'll only get the relevant ones (if they are not in google they are unlikely to have traffic).

The code is included as well as an example usage. He also points out FixtureShell for more command-line CakePHP examples.

Eirik Hoem has posted a new look at a function that can be amazingly helpful when you have a script with issues that needs a little extra help cleaning up after itself - register_shutdown_function.

Scripts tend to die, and that's not usually nice. We do not want to show the user a fatal error nor a blank page (display errors off) . PHP has a function called register_shutdown_function which lets us set up a function which is called at execution shutdown. What this means is that our function will be executed when our script is done executing / dying and PHP execution is about to shut down.

He suggests various things that can be done with the functionality, including checking for successful script execution (via a false variable that can be checked for success).

The highly controversial GoPHP5 project has come to his finishing mark (actually February 5th) and has been claimed a success by Robert Douglass, one of the creators of the project:

Congratulations are in order. Since the launch of GoPHP5.org, over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts have come on board to support the adoption of PHP 5.2. As opposed to just a few months ago, it is now easy to find a hosting solution that supports PHP 5, and software developers can turn to the attractive new features that PHP 5 offers without the need to worry that they are leaving their end users without options.

He gives credits to Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle for their hard work towards making the project a success and notes that the project can stand as a successful effort that the community pulled together on to make development and the platforms we build on that much better. Be sure and check out the long list of projects and hosting companies that made the move to PHP5.

Ben Ramsey says congratulations to the Costa Rica PHP group on having their first meeting with 37 developers in attendance.

It sounds like they have a very active and vibrant PHP developer community in Costa Rica, and they've found two very supportive universities that have offered to host their meetings and events. I wish that every PHP user group could find sponsors willing to provide computer labs and even bring in outside speakers!

According to the Costa Rica PHP website they had a wonderful response from local developers and found them all eager to contribute however they could. They even have the support of two local universities where they can meet/do work in their labs (even bring in speakers from other countries).

Lukas Smith has posted some ominous thoughts about the future of the LAMP stack in the online development world - specifically asking if the popularity of the grouping could be what might ultimately cause its downfall.

The issue is that there is simply not enough top qualified talent that knows LAMP well enough to hire. Or maybe its just too hard to find them? It seems all the good guys are already hired. As a result companies end up looking for other technology, not because they actually believe that these technologies are any better or worth the license fees that these usually require to be paid up...

He suggests two things that could be possible lead-ins to the "demise" of LAMP - the fact that LAMP just isn't taught along side other languages in school and that, since PHP is only just now getting into the offices of the "major players", there hasn't been enough time to prove to them that PHP has worth in their business.

Be sure to check out some of the great comments on this one.

Well, the PHP Throwdown event has come and gone with all of the teams giving their best creating an application hoping to reach the top.

Wow, what can I say but w00t! The throwdown was a tremendous success and went off without any major problems. Weâ'™re still compiling all the final projects and Iâ'™ll be reporting some statistics about those (as in who was using what and how many competitors we had per category). I am excited to see what all has come of it.

There were also bloggers from about the web that covered the event either for themselves or for the team they were a part of.

Congrats to all of those who participated and we'll all be anxiously awaiting the results! OH, and if you didn't get a chance to participate this year, you can still grab a tshirt to remember the event by.

On Hiveminds Magazine's site today, there's a new article that asks the question "what makes a web language successful?"

PHP, Classic ASP and ASP.NET, and soon Ruby owe their success to shared web hosting. I honestly believe that shared hosting is more important than being "enterprise ready" when it comes to web development.

Shared hosting is the reason that the internet became an economic force. So why is it that certain parts of the IT world ignore shared hosting and it's needs?

They explain what they mean by noting that Java isn't what shared hosts need, Python isn't quite there yet, and Perl is still a bit more difficult to use in a web environment. They even look at what it would take for these languages to become more "PHP-like" and really get to that next stage of web development popularity.

Our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org has a new post today with a request from Joshua Eichorn, the developer of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package for success stories.

If you've used HTML_AJAX to make something cool I'd like to hear from you.

If what you've created is publically accessible that would be even better.

Just leave a comment on this post saying what you've created and given a link to it if you can. Any suggestions on improvements that would make further development easier are also appreciated.

With the HTML_AJAX package being as well-developed as it is, I'm sure that there are more than a few out there using it - so get on over and submit your story today!