This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars. We're about to take those activities to the next level. We are going to build a 'PHP Center of Expertise'.

Efforts the newly formed group will contribute to include open source projects, aiding user groups, developing training materials and developing professional services related to PHP. The idea is still in the planning stages so any feedback or comments you might have are welcome.

You know when you reach that point when you just don't remember where to configure your Zend Platform Events, how to set up your Tunneling, or what that Zend Core extension does? Well the documentation team at Zend have come up with a way to make all Zend product documentation as easily available as possible, so you can all benefit from our wisdom and experience.

The documentation center is a resource for all things Zendy - information on their products made searchable and easy to browse.

The courses will take place starting January 2006 and be based on an extended, 4-day version of our popular PHP Essentials class.

The class teaches you how to program in PHP 5 in a 4 day course with information ranging from the basics up to advanced topics including XML, web services, and OOP programming. The days are broken up into six hour chunks, building in complexity as each day progresses. The cost for the course is $1995.99 USD/$2395.19 CAD.

They're also offering a special package for anyone not in the Chicago area to help with travel and lodging for $299 in top of the cost of the class. Check out the course's website for complete information.

Classes are coming up quick - January 30th, 2007 and February 27th, 2007 - so get your registration in now!

There's not that much to it, but what it does have is great - the step by step process you'll need to get started with all things Flex-y.

If you were listening to my talk last week at the Zend PHP Conference in San Jose, and were interested in Adobe Flex, here's how you can get started with Flex Builder and PHP.

The steps are pretty simple - download, install, watch a demo (FlexTV! woo!), and grab the PHP RIA SDK to make the interface happen. He also recommends getting involved with some of the Adobe-based resources that are out there, including the mailing list for the SDK and the Flex Developer Center.

Go and check out Chorizo!'s new Help Center. We extended the existing tutorials and provide a smooth overview about the current documentation. Included is an overview about all the scanner plugins Chorizo! is using and explain a bit what each plugin does.

There are "Getting Started" guides offered, video tutorials, details on each of the plugins (PHPversions, XSS plugin, Session injection, etc), some of the features of the scanner, and some general troubleshooting information.

Along with this launch, they have also upgraded the PHP SDK they offer to a shiny, new version - 4.0. According to DynamicWebPages.de, they've added the ability to make a request without an SSL certifiicate, made installation easier, and more.

Their prefered method of installation has moved over to a PEAR-based setup, making it as easy as going to the source directory and calling "pear install package.xml". Of course, not everyone has access to the server their running on (shared hosting), so they provide another method just for them. It's still simple, but requires the inclusion of files on each execution.]]> Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:16:57 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4888 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4888 the announcement of the new Yahoo! PHP Development Center, there's been a lot of buzz around the PHP community, including this new post from Harry Fuecks over on the SitePoint PHP Blog today.

Via John Cox, Yahoo! have opened up a PHP Development Center for their search APIs and, more interestingly, have started exposing their search data as serialized PHP strings. That's "serialized" as in the serialize function.

This is very cool but think a little caution is needed when using it, given that it wasn't designed to be a wire format but rather for local storage of PHP data, within a trusted environment.

In the rest of the post he looks at a few different topics - whether it's inherently safe to use, a quick look at chatacter encoding, and an example of how to use the service with the PEAR::HTTP_Request package.]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:17:43 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4883 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4883 Yahoo! PHP Developer Center.

There are already several links to articles (HowTos on creating REST web services) and links to other code examples using the service. Along with this release, they also note that:

...many of their web services now return serialized PHP (developer.yahoo.net/common/phpserial.html). PHP developers will now be able to consume these web services even more easily than before. Yahoo!'s Search, Maps, and Travel REST web services now return serialized PHP by simply adding the "output=php" parameter to any web services request.

The example of this feature has been given in the form of a search for PHP-related podcasts: link here. The resulting output can then be used in a PHP application through the use of the unserialize function. ]]> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:17:00 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4662 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4662 this post on Nexen.net today, there's a link to this resource from Acunetix - a "Web Site Security Center".

Web site security is possibly today's most overlooked aspect of securing data. Hackers are focusing their efforts on hacking web-based applications - shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content, etc. Web sites are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and control crucial data since they often link directly to customer databases.

The Web Site Security Center provides information about the most important web attacks, such as SQL injection & Cross site scripting. Besides explaining how they work, the center also provides information on finding and fixing these web vulnerabilities.

The site provides all sorts of resources on the various types of attacks (including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, authentication hacking, and Google hacking). They have a scanner you can download a trial of, but the information the site provides is valuable enough...]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:40:26 -0600