I am pretty happy to announce that I have just deployed a new version of the symfony project website with a brand new "Plugins" section (look at the top menu entries) to replace the Trac plugin management system.

The new section has a listing of all of the available plugins (can be filtered) and dedicated pages for each of them with things like license, version and release information. You can also search the plugins based on keywords and authors. Developers adding their plugins have a full admin interface and uses the Trac accounts to manage access.

You may be wondering why it has been taking us such a long time to react. Here's the main reason: we had not a very strong security alert reporting and qualifying process. This has been fixed recently. So as of now, if you find a security bug in symfony, please send an email to security at symfony-project.com, with as much details as you can and ideally a patch if you can provide one.

The wiki has a whole section on how to report security issues to get them to the right place.

Since the DOM XML library comes equipped with many other methods that can be useful for adding custom attributes to the existing nodes of a given XML document, and creating new CDATA sections, among other things.

They start with a review of the DOM functionality to get you reacquainted. From there they move off into the createAttribute function and its use in the creation of CDATA elements in your XML.

Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn Reiersøl et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.

Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:

• Basic PHP tools and concepts
• Developing applications via Test Driven Development
• Web presentation and user interfaces
• Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction

Although a site may not always warrant a full multilayer navigation menu, most websites usually have at least a few different sections. Often many pages have links back to the top pages of each section, and therefore it is useful to highlight which section the user is currently in. Listing 9.2.1 looks at the URL of the current web page and, based on that, determines what section of the website it is in and changes the section menu.

They provide the script and a brief explaination, but not much else. Seems like the snippet might make more sense with a little more context, but it's still useful.

PEAR version 1.4.7 has been released at pear.php.net, this is a recommended upgrade for all folks. Particularly important is anyone who is trying to do RPM packaging using the --packagingroot option (remember --installroot is for people who wish to create a workable version of PEAR in the installroot directory, --packagingroot is for those who wish to create a fake installation for RPM purposes). Also, Tim Jackson's PEAR_Command_Packaging package has been introduced to solve the issues in the makerpm command, and we welcome both Bertand Gugger and Tim Jackson as helpers to the PEAR package itself.

Other updates include the implementation of a --CLEAN-section in .phpt files, run-tests for PHPUnit-based tests, and loads of bug fixes. Check out this latest update and all of the new features over on the PEAR website...]]> Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:59:51 -0600