Last month, we were pleased to publish all the videos from this year's edition of Symfony Live conferences in Paris and in San Francisco. During the first week following their publication, more than 10,000 views were recorded, that's amazing! And today, we've just added 5 more hours of talks.

There's seven videos in the playlist including talks from Mike van Riel (video), Rowan Merewood (video) and Fabien Potencier himself (video) with a look at what's coming up for Symfony.

There's nothing quite like having your blogging system go MIA for a while to give your community an overwhelming impression that no one is home. Thankfully; despite the radio silence between updates there's quite a lot to talk about!

The updates include mentions of several new PEPr proposals for packages related to Mercurial support, Twitter and holiday date validation. There's also a mention of the large amount of PEAR channels that are popping up and the future of PEAR in PHP 5.3+ with Pyrus.

One of the strengths of Symfony2 lies in its components; they define the building blocks of the framework and they can be used as standalone libraries. [...] The Symfony2 components have been available on Git for quite some time now, and as of today, I'm really excited to announce that they are also installable via the brand new Symfony2 PEAR channel, powered by Pirum of course.

Packages included in the list installable on the PEAR channel include:

• BrowserKit
• DependencyInjection
• HttpKernel
• Serializer
• Validator

There's already been a sizeable response so far, but if you haven't had your say yet, please head on over and leave a comment soon. I'll write up a summary of the suggested requirements on Monday.

The idea behind the aggregator is to provide a single place for developers to look (besides the PEAR site, of course) for PEAR packages they might find useful. The key here is that the aggregator would be bringing together the independent channels out there and making them simpler to find. Feature suggestions so far include: showing where the library lives (like github or bitbucket), creating a proxy channel for a "single install" location and customized lists of a user's "in use" and "tracked" packages.

Since we seem to like blaming the PEAR Group, and getting that ball kicked back to us, it's time we did something useful. We've spent too much time ignoring PEAR as we grew apart from it with our frameworks, standalone libraries and custom plugin architectures. We're making life harder for ourselves in doing so. Stuart Herbert has posted a short article to gather requirements for a Pear Channel Aggregator. I strongly suggest that interested PHP programmers drop by and add a comment with some suggestions/feedback.

Stuart's suggestion has already gathered some good comments and suggestions from all around the community including some mentions of efforts from the Symfony project to do something similar.

For those that may not have caught my first post on the subject, Phake is a mock framework that I announced a couple of days ago in Introducing Phake Mocking Framework. It was recommended in the comments that I get it on a pear channel somewhere, which is something I have wanted to do but hadn't had a reason to do until this week. Well, now there is an official Digital Sandwich Pear Channel that is hosting Phake.

Discover the channel with the PEAR installer and run the install with the path provided. He notes that the release is alpha because of the lack of documentation but, despite this, the API is stable. Also, you'll need to be using PHP 5.2+ to use the tool.

After a quiet holiday season, the PEAR community has started rumbling again. [...] If this level of activity is anything to judge by, the future of PEAR looks bright for 2010!

Updates this month include a mention of the PEAR project on digg.com, the release of several new package versions for things like Facebook and the Mail package. They've also set up a continuous integration environment to help make the maintenance and testing of the code in the new releases simpler. There's also mentions of Phirum and PEARFarm and how they're lowering the barrier for PEAR installation everywhere.

I think services like these are an important reason why gems are so popular amongst Ruby developers, and I figured that PHP really needs something similar. So over the Christmas, I have been brewing on a service, which is now stable enough that I'll make it available to the community at large. pearhub.org provides a place where you can register a project, that is hosted on Github, Google code or similar (Currently only git and subversion is supported). The service will generate a PEAR package and put it on a PEAR channel.

PEAR channels have been difficult to set up in the past but the pearhub.org service makes it simple and you get the added benefit of being able to use the PEAR installer application to do installations and upgrades. You can find out more about the service on their FAQ.

Pirum lets you setup PEAR channel servers in a matter of minutes. Pirum is best suited when you want to create small PEAR channels for a few packages written by a few developers. Pirum consists of just one file, a command line tool, written in PHP. There is no external dependencies, no not need for a database, no need to setup credentials, and nothing need to be installed or configured.

All you need to do to get the tool is download the pirum file and go. It includes features like per-channel HTML pages and Atmos feed release tracking along with several other standard PEAR channel features.

There's already been one project that's made the swtich - PHP_Depend.

Our existing channel #phpwomen remains open to all but we're adding a little space for the women to get together without the men if they want to. This channel has a password - pop in to #phpwomen on freenode, introduce yourself and request access details if you want to join in!

If you've never gotten in on IRC but want to find out more about it (and connecting to the Freenode network) check out the About section on the Freenode website. Come join in the discussion on both this new channel and on the current everyone's-invited #phpwomen channel!