On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

From CMStr.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to set up Joomla manually just in case something happens with the install and you need to change things yourself.

Why would I want to do a manual install when my web host has this Fantastico thingy that will install Joomla for me? Good question. [...] If you are building websites for a living, and or plan on using Joomla a lot, then you really need to start doing your own installs. [...] If you are an experienced parachute jumper, you would pack your own chute right? This is no different.

Screenshots are included to help make the process easier as they walk you through setting up the basics like language settings and database information. They also touch on the FTP setting (off for security) and removing the admin user's information to help make things a bit more secure. It's not a comprehensive list of the things you'd need to do to get it 100% configured for just what you need, but it's a start.

The beacon of hope that is Agavi is carried to Montréal this week, where the ConFoo Web Tech conference takes place.

David will be giving a talk on Agavi, and although we know that some of you will be there to watch it live, all those who couldn’t make it to Montréal (it’s a lovely city, so consider attending next year) need not despair, as at least the slides, and possibly also a recording of the talk will be posted after the conference.

If you’re there in person, make sure to catch a seat in one of the front rows so you can be first in line after the talk to grab one of the Agavi t-shirts that made the long journey to Canada.

On Kavoir.com there's a new post that reminds you that hashing isn't enough anymore to protect your users and their passwords. They offer a suggestion or two of what you can do to help lock things down a bit more.

The common practice is to hash the user password and store the hash string of the password in the database. When the user tries to log in and supplies his password, it is used to generate a hash string to be compared to the one stored in the database. [...] This approach may be secure in the 70s of the last century, but barely any more.

Computing has evolved enough to where hashed can be matched, sometimes in less than two or three minutes. Their answer to the problem? Generate a random salt each time you create the hash with a constant being used as a base. A code snippet calling a user-defined function and the sha1 function are included.

Brandon Savage has posted his own response to the "don't be afraid of the upgrade" thread that's been going around concerning updating to PHP 5.3. He takes a different approach to the matter, though - one of a bit more caution.

When it comes to open source projects endorsing PHP 5.3 as their one and only PHP platform, I encourage caution. When it comes to open source projects that use PHP, there are three main issues that I believe should be considered before making the leap to PHP 5.3 (or any new release of any new software).

He sees three considerations projects and companies should consider before making the upgrade on their servers - the amount of control you have over the environment, deciding if the upgrade is worth possible backwards compatibility breaks and how much support you want to still provide for the pre-5.3 version(s).

New on the PHPClasses.org blog there's an article on neural networks written up by Louis Stowasser looking specifically at creating a neural mesh with PHP.

Neural networks are a relatively new technology that aims to reverse engineer the functionality of the brain within a mathematics model. This may sound daunting and complex but the underlying concepts are very simple and Neural Mesh does the hard work for you. In a Web environment NNs (neural networks) are considered too slow and complex to warrant effort on what might even be a trivial task. To solve this, Neural Mesh has been heavily optimized. It uses caching to speed up running and training of networks.

He explains what a neural network is on a base level and talks about it's ability to learn from the training its given (supervised or unsupervised). He also talks about how the networks can be useful and how to use the framework (found here) to create a simple network.

A new tutorial has been posted to the Zend Developer Zone today looking at making scalable vector graphics with PHP and the hep of one of two charting packages - ezcGraph or SVGGraph (examples are provided for both).

Programmatically generating graphs and charts using SVG requires a deep understanding of the SVG specification and the various SVG primitives, as well as a fair amount of time for research, experimentation and debugging. Or, in other words, that's your entire weekend shot! Fortunately, help is at hand. There are a number of open-source PHP libraries that support SVG chart generation, and using them can significantly reduce the amount of work involved in adding this feature to a Web application.

He shows how to create simple images like bar, line and pie charts as well as adding in other things like a legend, custom titles and a sample where the user can define the sizes of a pie chart via some form input fields. Screenshots are included for all code examples to give you a better idea of the end result.

On the php|architect site there's a recent post that splits apart the singletons versus static methods debate that seems to com up every once and a while with a better suggestion - dependency injection.

Much more important than performance is the fact that both static methods and singletons suffer from major drawbacks. When it comes to deciding between the two, you might forgo the benchmark comparison and choose the third-party candidate: dependency injection.

He mentions the "dark side" of both static methods and singletons and how dependency injection can help rid your code of both. Instead of focusing just on the benchmark numbers, DI helps you keep your code more well-structured and "smarter" by scoping things to where they need to be and making them easier to test.

On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

This week's DZone Refcard is about Getting Started with the Zend Framework. The card introduces you to the basics of the Zend Framework and sets you on the path to creating your first project. I met the author, Jason Gilmore, to find out more about the topic.

They talk about some of what the framework currently has to offer developers, what kind of involvement he's had with it, who it supports as far as advanced PHP features and what's to come in version 2.0. The Zend Framework RefCard mentioned can be viewed or downloaded here - a six-page quick reference for some of the more common Zend Framework tasks.

Latest PECL Releases:

• WinCache 1.1.0
• timezonedb 2010.5

When I discussed VersionControlTools I said that it was an unscientific agglomeration of opinion. As I was doing it I realized that I could add some spurious but mesmerizing numbers to my analysis by doing a survey. Google's spreadsheet makes the mechanics of conducting a survey really simple, so I couldn't resist.References Reference:  ...

On April 2007 a friend and I started a project we named "unaneem". The purpose of this project was to develop a community website which helps people to share and organize events.We decided to use only open source technologies. As our core application library we used CakePHP.The project steps over time were : April 2007 to June2007 : Functional studies June 2007 to July 2007 : Templates design July 2007 to September 2007 : Database development September 2007 to October 2008 (now): Application development October 2008 : Production deployment : unaneem goes online ! October 2008 to 2009 (now): Beta version test and debug The application uses CakePHP as its core PHP library, Prototype as its core AJAX library and many open source external PHP and JS libraries : PHP Libraries : PHPThumb PHPBrowscap KCaptcha ... JS Libraries : Scriptaculous SWFUpload Lightbox ... You can see the application current version at http://www.unaneem.com/

Former Novell CTO Becomes W3C CEO

Alvaro Videla has submitted a new post he's written up combining PHP and Erlang yet again, but this time he's using it to just store key/value pairs rather than for session data.

In this post I want to show you some of the neat things that can be done with the PHP-Erlang Bridge extension: A Key Value Store. Erlang comes packed with a Key Value store in the form of the ETS module. This is database is pretty fast and efficient for storing the Erlang terms in memory.

He tried a proof of concept to see how well the system would respond and was able to push over 150k items into the storage in one second. Sample code and instructions on getting the bridge working are included in the post.

On the Template Monster blog there's a recent post looking at some of the upcoming features in WordPress 3.0 that many WordPress site owners have eagerly been waiting for.

Alright bloggers, web surfers and simple web enthusiasts, we've got some fascinating news for you all. Yes, Internet community can't stop buzzing about the forthcoming release of the new version of #1 blogging software '" WordPress 3.0. [...] The official release is scheduled for May 2010 but now we have opportunity to mark the major advantages that this release will bring.

They list a few of the major enhancements that'll happen in the new release including:

• a built-in multi-user option
• custom post types
• a new default design/theme
• and changes related to security concerns

You can find out more about this upcoming release from this post to the man WordPress blog.

Matt Butcher has a new post to his blog today with five things that every PHP developer should know about MongoDB, the popular NoSQL database project.

2010 is the year of the document database. While momentum has been steadily building over the last seven years or so, there are now a wide variety of stable document databases -- from cloud-based ones from Amazon and Google, to a wide variety of Open Source tools, most notably CouchDB and MongoDB. So what is MongoDB? Here are five things every PHP developer should know about it.

He points out a few things - that MongoDB is a stand-alone server, that it's schemaless, you won't need to learn another query language to use it and that PHP and MongoDB play very well together (thanks to the Mongo PECL package already released).

R.I.P. Felipe Gaúcho: DZone MVB & Tireless Java Advocate The DZone team was very sad to read the news that Felipe Gaúcho had passed away this weekend. Felipe has been an active member of JavaLobby for many years, as well as being a key JUG leader.

Hi, today it will be again a very short blog post about a feature we just added to the development version of NetBeans. Many of you requested this change so we hope that you will like this change:

The behavior should be as expected, it means that if one checks a directory, all folders and files underneath the directory are checked as well.

However, if anyone of you still prefer the current dialog (a "table"), start NetBeans with -J-Dnb.php.transfer.ui.table=true and leave a comment why do you think it's better, an option could be added for it (probably in Tools > Options > PHP).

That's all for today, as always, please test it and report all the issues or enhancements you find in NetBeans IssueZilla (component php, subcomponent FTP Support).

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post (technically a repost) of an article from Kevin Schroeder about using the job queue in the Zend Server software to enhance the functionality of your application.

When talking about building a scalable application there is a big concept out there that many PHP developers are not overly familiar with. That concept is queuing. It is becoming much more prevalent in PHP-land but the concept of a queue is still relatively unused among PHP developers. [...] Queuing a job is actually very easy to do. A job is run by calling a URL where that job resides. The Job Queue daemon will receive the request from your application and will then call the URL that you specified in the API call. Once you call that URL your application can continue going on its merry way to finish serving up the request.

He includes some code snippets showing how to create the request - in this case a simple call that will just email when the job is preformed. There's more than one way to do it and he includes a more well structured/less scripty way to do things in an abstract class.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with links to a few good PHP-based CodePlex projects that he thinks look pretty useful for the development community out there.

Admittedly, I'm interested in some of these projects [tagged with PHP] purely out of curiosity, but some of them actually look useful. I won't claim that these are the best of the PHP projects on Codeplex (hence the question mark in the title), but here are some that piqued my interest and that I plan to check out.

The projects in his list are include PHP LINQ classes, Virtual Earth integration and the Zend Framework DB adapter for Microsoft SQL Native Client.