A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

Via Codewalkers.com today, we learn about two new articles from the APress "Inside Open Source" site - one dealing with interfacing the Google API with the PEAR SOAP extension and the other dealing with the date/time functionality of PHP. Both are excerpts from two of APress' books.

The first article, Using the Google API from PEAR, demonstrates how to install the Services_Google PEAR package and use it in your code. They give three examples of its flexibility with three different kinds of requests to the API - a spelling check, grabbing the URL for Google's cached page of a site, and of course, searching through Google's resource to locate matching websites.

Article number two, Displaying Times and Dates in Other Languages with PHP, looks generally at the functionality of PHP to work with and display dates and times in multiple formats. There's a few code examples and a long list of the arguments you can pass in to format the output string just how you'd like it.

Davey Shafik has updated his blog, Pixelated Dreams, today with his latest entry from this year's php|tek conference.

He mentions giving his second talk, "Migration to PHP 5.1", going well, and has links to both sets of slides:

• Future Development of PHP Applications
• Migrating to PHP 5.1

There's also a brief note about the "Frameworks Panel Discussion" he attended (hosted by Marcus Whitney) and the success it was.

Davey also uploaded some new pictures to the php|tek photo stream for those that aren't able to attend.

From the O'Reilly ONLamp.com site today, there's a release about the SourceForge.net 2006 Community Choice Awards winners , and two PHP-based projects have made the list.

From March 15th through the 17th, users within Sourceforge.net were able to nominate projects. From these initial nominations, the finalists were chosen and these choices were made available to the community for voting. The finalists included a range of Open Source solutions ranging from CRM and firewall solutions to anti-virus and Xbox Media Center innovations.

Final voting was conducted March 17 - 23, 2006, and the project winners were selected by voting within 13 key technology categories, plus "Best Overall" project. Nominations and voting were managed by the third-party research firm, Wilson Research.

The PHP projects that made the cut were:

• phpMyAdmin in the "Database Project" and "SysAdmin Project" categories
• A PHP PayPal API in the "Financial Project" section

The Jayson Minard continues his "Blueprint for PHP Applications" series on the Zend Developer Zend today in part two, a look at creating and setting up the "bootstrapper" file mentioned previously.

In Part 1 of this article I talked a lot about funneling. Sending every request to one PHP file that then controls the flow of the request into our application code. This one PHP file is called the "Bootstrapper" and deals with everything in common for every request our application receives. The bootstrapper can setup, configure and gift wrap everything that all pages have in common. It can make sure the include path is setup correctly, that the environment is configured correctly, all PHP settings are set, that common model objects are loaded, and that the front controller is invoked to begin your MVC processing.

If you setup the bootstrapper correctly your application code will be more manageable and consistent, along with being easier to write in the first place.

They focus on teh directory structure in this part, demonstrating the correct structure, how to set the .htaccess to coordinate with it, and the creation of a simple PHP file to handle all incoming requests.

Justin Silverton continues his "PHP Security Mistakes" series with this new post, looking at issues surrounding system calls, file uploads, and including files into your scripts.

In one of my previous articles, I mentioned the top 5 security mistakes made in PHP. This article is a follow-up, with some more common security mistakes.

For the three topics he describes the functionality PHP offers for them as well as a suggestion or two as to how you can prevent these issues from showing up in your scripts.

In this post from the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks shares information about two more framework systems for PHP - Tonic and Code Igniter.

Yes I know'"with the framework in progress, we don't need no more stinkin' frameworks. Except there's a couple I've seen recently which are noteworthy. I haven't delved into the source code in any depth'"exploring framework code bases has become as much fun as watching paint dry, but there are some interesting ideas here, if you're looking to new angles on the problem.

The "new angles" he mentions are:

• For Tonic, the fact that it's a "RESTful" environment and feels like web.py in its development
• And for Code Igniter, because it has a "Rails-esque" with an interesting approach to URL mapping.

According to a post over on the PHP-GTK project site, there's been some real development work going on for the next version, PHP-GTK 2.

This month PHP-GTK 2 has continued its march toward an initial release. Andrei has been working through bug fixes and implementing new features.

Even though PHP-GTK 2 is not quite stable yet, several applications have been developed using the CVS version. There are now four PHP-GTK 2 packages available on PEAR including the newly added Gtk2_ScrollingLabel and Gtk2_PHPConfig. Christian Weiske has released the first game developed with PHP-GTK 2: Minesweeper.

They also list out some of the activity that's been going on with the packages, including:

• The PHP-GTK 2 documentation is filling out. More classes have been documented and given examples (especially the GtkTree* classes).
• Most of the get_size* methods have been implemented.
• The Gnope installer has been downloaded over 8000 times since its release last month.

On PHPBuilder.com today, there's the second part in their "Using XML: A PHP Developer's Primer" series.

In the first part of this series, we took a look at how PHP 5 can be used to manipulate and parse XML files. In this installment, we are going to focus on Ajax, one of the most useful and topical applications of XML.

Initially, we are going to introduce Ajax and learn how to use the XMLHTTP object provided by most modern web browsers to create a live email validation form. Then we will pick up where we left off with the theme of XML and introduce XSLT, which we will use to transform our library XML from the previous article into valid XHTML code.

They jump immediately in, starting with the "what is Ajax?" question to provide a good base. The sample application that they help you build to work up your Ajax skills is an email validation app that checks the user's entry as they're putting it in. Of course, all of the PHP and Javascript code that you'll need is provided.

Today, Devshed as posted the second and last part in their "Error Handling in PHP" series - Introducing Exceptions in PHP 5.

Welcome to the last part of the series "Error Handling in PHP." In two parts, this series introduces the basics of error handling in PHP. It demonstrates some of the most common methods for manipulating errors in PHP 4, and explains the implementation of exceptions in PHP 5, particularly in object-oriented environments.

They introduce things like try/catch blocks as well as more complex items like custom exceptions and exception subclassing. They start with the basics, but quickly move into grabbing more detailed error information, working with the various error types, and extending the Exception class with subclasses to make it more flexible...