Want to help out on the PHP project but not sure where to start? Lukas Smith suggests helping out with the wiki (at wiki.php.net).

I feel that I can make more of a difference in these other [personal] projects. [...] I hope others will pick up the slack and make sure that PDO gets love, at people diligently follow up on todo items mentioned on internals and that someone else picks up wiki.php.net and takes care of some regular maintenance stuff.

He mentions one thing specifically - an update that will need to happen to the Dokuwiki software the wiki runs on. If you're interested, send Lukas an email/leave a comment and he'll point you in the right direction.

Chris Jones has pointed out a new wiki page that's been set up as a more centralized resource for frequently asked questions about PHP and Oracle.

I've updated the old Oracle PHP FAQ and the Oracle PHP Troubleshooting FAQs that were hosted by Oracle Technology Network (OTN). We've redirected the old FAQ pages to a new wiki page: http://wiki.oracle.com/page/PHP+Oracle+FAQ with the updated content. Feel free to create an account and make updates. Hosting the FAQ on a wiki seems appropriate because PHP is open source and grows by the value of everyone's contributions.

Questions so far include some of the basics (connecting, querying, etc) and a few more complicated issues like pre-fetching, LOBS and new information for using the Zend Server to connect to your Oracle databases.

Its about that time again and David Coallier has pointed it out - the Google Summer of Code is not far off and PHP will be right in the middle again!

Once again we are happy to announce that PHP will be taking part in the Google Summer of Code. Already with a list of more than interesting and intelligent ideas, we are looking to get more ideas. This of course means that PEAR Developers, PECL Developers and PHP(Core) Developers now have to cook some ideas up and submit them to the GSoC 2009 PHP Wiki so we can have more good ideas for students to apply to!

There's already a few things about this year's GSoC that have been posted - the page on the PHP.net wiki, a mailing list announcement on the PEAR dev list and, of course, the official GSoC page.

A quick new post to the NetBeans blog today points out the support for Selenium in the IDE. The NetBeans wiki has more information:

Before trying Selenium in PHP be sure to have PHPUnit and Selenium_Testing packages installed. The recommended way to install both is using PEAR.

The wiki page guides you through the creation of a simple testing setup complete with screenshots of the interface the whole way through. The plugin page has more details on running the tests.

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that's not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.

Its that time of year again - time to get the ball rolling for this year's PHP TestFest. Zoe Slattery has kicked things off with a new post for today.

It's time to start getting the 2009 PHP TestFest underway. The TestFest is a worldwide event in which PHP user groups and individuals contribute to PHP by writing tests for PHP. It's a great way to contribute to one of the most successful open source projects there has ever been, it's also pretty cool to see your name in the the source distribution for code that's running on over 20 million web domains.

If you're a user group (or really just want to participate), send an email over to the PHP qa list (php-qa@lists.php.net) with your preferred date and a primary contact for the group. The groups/people will then be listed over on the PHP wiki so you can check to see if there's others in your area already participating.

Things are just getting organized, but there's already a few things in the works - a SVN repository where participants can commit tests directly (instead of funneling them all through a few people like before), some sponsors (maybe elePHPants!) and the search for mentors to help out those writing tests and can do the final review/commit of the user-submitted tests.

More event and contact information can be found near the end of her post.

Content no longer valid

Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:

Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.

His series of articles covers:

• Frameworks
• Wikis
• Content Management Systems
• Debugging
• Blogware
• High Performance PHP

For those that have been keeping up with the namespace debate in the PHP community lately (the issue was the operator that would be used), it seems that a decision has been made - the backslash ( ) is the character of choice.

From Lukas Smith's blog:

So today we had an IRC meeting to discuss namespaces in PHP. We came to a final decision replacing the current double colon separator with a backslash to solve ambiguity issues with the current syntax. So far there has not been much of a reaction on list, except for a post which mentioned concerns related to the fact that backslash is currently used for escaping, but which was quickly responded by Greg to point out that yes we were aware of this, but it is not an issue if you know how to use the backslash properly in double quote strings.

You can find out more about this implementation using the backslash on this entry in the PHP.net wiki (near the bottom of the page).

Andi Gutmans has posted a reminder about the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo happening Spetember 15th through 18th in Santa Clara, CA.

I can't believe it's already ZendCon time again! I've been meeting with the planning committee and I'm really excited about this year's conference. All the usual things are back to make it great: we have a great lineup of speakers, the Meet the Teams session, and special guests like noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of ajaxian.com, and Alex Russell from Dojo.

He mentions things like the unconference (with even more great speakers, just in a more "unofficial" setting) and about the conference wiki with more details on who will be there and what they'll be attending.

There's still seats open for this year's conference, so reserve your spot today - check out the registration page on the ZendCon site for more information.