On the ThinkPHP blog, Florian Eibeck has posted an overview of some key things to consider when internationalizing your application/website.

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

The PHPClasses.org website has posted a new book review about the Packt Publishing offering "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites" (book by David Mercer, review by Zoltan Hunt).

This Packt book takes the reader through installing the Drupal software, configuring and theming, adding content and deploying a Web site. It is aimed at the end user who is looking to setup and customize Drupal's themes, but not actually write their own modules, which would be a topic for book on its own.

The review talks about some of the origins of the content management system, the contents of the book (use cases, introductions to the functionality, etc) and how to manage your site.

With the recent stir caused by the new iPhone, it's only natural that developers are looking for easy ways to make their sites as compatible as possible with the mobile platform. The Symfony project has posted a guide to helping you make your apps optimized for mobile use.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format. The default format is still HTML but symfony supports several other formats out of the box as defined in the factories.yml file.

Using this system, it's easy to add new output formats by adding to the default layouts the framework comes equipped with. The Content-Type can be changed and layouts can be disabled as needed. This lets you make a custom definition just for use with the iPhone without a lot of hassle.

They also include an example of how to make one of these optimized layouts, including some iPhone "screenshots" of the resulting pages.

With the successful relaunch of the PHPFreaks.com website recently, Daniel Egeberg wanted to share a little glimpse behind the work that it took to get to that place. In this new blog entry, he talks about the technology, code and design aspects they worked through.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

Gennady Feldman has posted two comments/suggestions about things he thinks could be done to improve the PEAR and PECL websites:

So I attended the PEAR2 presentation and had a chance to bug the guys behind PEAR/PECL. There's definitely exciting stuff happening and they are pushing forward with many exciting ideas.

His suggestions include updates to documentation, crrection broken parts of the API and a "Package News" feature with the ability to leave comments on them.

He's also posted another suggestion - the ability of the authors of the project to provide other links besides the ones just for the project (external documentation, tutorials, etc)

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted about the next step in his personal growth on the internet - a personal site/blog of his own over at andigutmans.com.

For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.

He lists the technologies he's using including the Zend Framework, the Zend_Gdata component and the Zend_Cache (for local caching of his blog feeds from Blogger).

PHPClasses.org has posted a review of a new PHP-related book from Packt Publishing, "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5":

This book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5. It was written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. It is intended for Web developers, designers, Web masters, content editors and marketing professionals. It is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla! 1.5, and for those who just want have a good printed manual at hand.

R.L. (the reviewer) goes through some of the chapters, detailing their content including some of the software mentioned in them (like Fireboard and DOCman). He recommends the book to anyone looking for a good in-hand Joomla! resource but notes that a chapter on security would have been a nice addition.

For those that might be wondering why some of their favorite blogs look a little different today - today is the official CSS Naked Day and some of the PHPers from around the community are getting involved too:

• Chris Shiflett
• Elizabeth Smith
• Lorna Mitchell
• Jon Gibbins
• Ben Ramsey
• Travis Swicegood

Check back as the day progresses for more sites added to the list! Are you participating? Let us know and we'll add you to the list!

A little bit back Akash Mehta posted a list of seven sites he thought could make you a better PHP programmer for reading and keeping track of:

Developing in PHP isn't a textbook science. There's skill to it, and that skill comes from experience. Now, you could try your hand at every single PHP development challenge out there, or you could learn from the experiences of others, widely published on the web in blogs and developer portals.

Included in the list are sites like php|architect's C7Y site, Planet PHP and the the Zend Developer Zone (oh yeah, PHPDeveloper.org made the list too!)

As you may (or may not, if you're a feed reader) have noticed, a few things have just changed around here. PHPDeveloper.org has made the move away from the Zend Framework over to the Solar Framework, and to answer the question of why - really it was just to try something new. We'd been using the Zend Framework since around back when it first hit the scene and felt like it was time for a change.

Paul Jones, Rodrigo Moraes, Antti Holvikari and the crew have done a fine job in producing a framework that's not only easy to use but makes building powerful web applications nice and easy. You can check out more about the framework on its site, SolarPHP.com.

That said, I'm sure there'll be a few growing pains as this new version of the site gets settled in, so bear with us. If you happen to spot something that might be an issue or just an opinion you want to share, drop us a line at info@phpdeveloper.org to let us know.