As you may have noticed, php|architect has a new website to replace our five-year-old ball of code. This change has been almost eighteen months in the making, and one of the main reasons behind my general absenteeism from almost any form of non-necessary social activity during that period.

[...] Here, therefore, are a few observation on our new platform, its development and our strategy. Consider this the "how we did it" piece, with its "why we did it" companion to follow in a future post.

He talks about the work that was involved (over 3 million lines of code!) and how the development process had happened before. To correct the situation, he headed up an effort to rework the site, bringing it back to a more manageable state. He describes some of the pains he went through in the process (i.e. hating databases, thinking about Python instead of PHP) and the three components they eventually hammered out - a custom framework for the logic, a templating system for the frontend and a service-oriented architecture for the backend that would make expanding in the future much simpler.

So, since it's a special occasion and they want to pass their joy about the release on to their customers, you can get free shipping for a limited time on all of the books shipped to the U.S. or Canada (and special prices for international orders).

Topics included in this week's show include:

• php|works schedule posted
• Internals: namespaces revived
• WebORB for PHP
• # email validation is HARD
• php shell for Mac

You can grab the latest show either by downloading the mp3 of the show or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and future (and past!) episodes.

Last week, Marco Tabini, publisher of php|architect and all around nice guy, posted the "Call For Papers" for php|tek 2007. [...] Since I couldn't find my "marketing speak to English" dictionary, I decided to call Marco and see if he could translate it for me manually.

Cal asks him what the theme means and what it means to those proposing sessions and for those that will be making the trip to Chicago this year in May. Marco's answers cover the two-layer intention behind the theme and the flexibility that it brings. They have their ideas on what it suggests, but it could just as well mean many things to many different people. The intent is to represent how PHP has evolved and that it's really become a mature, innovative language to work with.