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.

Recently on twitter, @johncongdon asked me about proposals for conferences. Specifically, he asked if I had any examples that I can share because he was considering submitting to a conference. While I don't have any examples to share, I can give you some advice on the topic.

He offers some recommended reading of one of his other posts and points out that there's not a single version of a proposal that'll work for all events. He also recommends finding a way to be noticed immediately, whether it be by name or by catchy content.

For a while now, I've been keen to build a HTML Sanitisation solution for PHP. Where else would I end up putting it other than in Zend Framework? As I've explored in past articles [1] [2], HTML Sanitisation in PHP is a very inconsistent practice. [...] Isn't it possible to create a sanitiser that is both secure by default and performs well?

He talks about his Wibble tool that's become the base of his idea for a filtering feature built into the framework. It mainly uses the PHP DOM functionality and HTML Tidy for speed and parsing and was benchmarked as performing better than the HTMLPurifier tool. If you're interested, check out his proposal for its inclusion in the Zend Framework 2.0.

Requirements have been solicited from both community members in various conversations, as well as looking through the issue tracker for feature requests that have been on the backlog due to potential BC breakage. This document reflects those ideas, and it's now in a position where we'd like to start a discussion on the direction outlined inside it.

Suggested features include things like:

• Pluggable architecture
• Distinct abstractions
• Addition of a Metadata sub-component
• Better testability in the Unit Tests
• Base Plugins / Type Converter

ZFW is the counterpart to Zend_Feed_Reader (as if that wasn't obvious). It's purpose is to, once again, offer an alternative to the current Zend_Feed component using similar principles to those applied in Zend_Feed_Reader. [...] Which brings us to upcoming proposal number two, the colourfully named Zend_PubSubHubbub! Or Zend_Feed_PubSubHubbub depending on which name is most appropriate. To explain, PubSubHubbub defines a protocol where any subscriber (that's you) can subscribe to a hub server which notifies you when any feed you want to follow has changed.

He gets into a bit more detail and explains some features for each component and how they'd integrate with a few of the other modules in the framework. You can find the proposal for the Zend_Feed_Writer here and the Zend_PubSubHubbub proposal here.

Thanks to the efforts of Daniel O'Connor, the PEAR website is getting nicer and better. Bug RSS feeds support Baetle now, the PEAR proposal system - PEPr - works again and many small improvements and fixes found their way on the site.

Baetle is a "bug and enhancement tracking language" project that describes the information in things like the BugZilla and Jira tracking applications.

nce again we are happy to announce our involvement with the Google Summer of Code project. Be sure to check our program at this years GSoC. We invite everyone to look at the list of ideas for this years GSoC, and get involved. Students are welcome to propose their own ideas, and we will consider all applications that are received before the April 3rd deadline.

The list for this summer includes projects like an Automatic Code Checker, creation of some Benchmarks (for the language), improvements to PHP-GTK and the creation of an online editor for the PHP.net manual documentation. If you have a proposal to add to the wiki, please submit it by April 3rd, 2009 to be considered.

Today is the last day of the Call for Papers for our upcoming php|tek 2009 conference, which will take place in Chicago between May 19 and 22nd. Don't forget to send in your proposals before it's too late!

You can get more information about submitting a talk from this page on the conference website as well as where to send the proposals and what kind of speaker compensation package they have to offer.

Almost a year ago, I proposed a really simple Zend Framework module, Zend_Log_Writer_Mail. [...] I've received a great deal of feedback, and have only recently committed myself to really pouring over that feedback to polish up the proposal. Thanks to everyone that commented! So, as of tonight, I polished the code up, made what I felt to be the most worthwhile changes, and marked it as "Ready for Recommendation."

You can find out more about the component and leave your own thoughts via the proposal page on the Zend Framework site.

With Eclipse PDT 2.0 to be released in September (or October) support for namespaces is already on the roadmap. Support for Phar archives has not been listed, yet. But in my opinion Eclipse PDT 2.0 must support handling Phar archives when PHP 5.3 will hit the street.

He points out some of the current lackings that the Eclipse extension has including the inability to browse phar archives and that there is no way to debug the archives. He's opened a feature request for the functonality to be added and suggested fleshing it out on the wiki.

This is where you come in - he wants to know what sort of support that developers out there would like for phar in this next release. Just leave comments on his blog with your ideas.