At the Mayflower Barcamp a few weeks ago we had a very interesting and promising project: Develop a PHP extension for communication with Skype. Actually this project was a merge between two projects: One was to "develop a PHP extension" - five out of six project members never had written any PHP extension or did any PHP core development before. The other project was the Skype extension, with the goal to have a new PHP function that could send a chat message to a given Skype profile.

As they worked on it, they realized that it was really D-Bus (the message bus system) they needed to interface with, not Skype directly. They include some of the code they used to make the connection - creating the message, setting a few parameters and "send and block" the message out to the D-Bus connection waiting. They've even put the code up on a public CVS repository (on thinkforge.org) if you'd like to download and play with it yourself.

Regular listeners are probably getting tired of hearing me say this, but today we are going to do something a little different. Back in October of 2007, PHPWomen passed their first birthday. It's taken me a while to get everything together but finally, I got a chance to sit down with four of the charter members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon and talk about the first year of phpwomen.

As usual, you have three options to get your own copy to listen to - add the feed to your favorite aggregator, listen directly on the page or just download the mp3. Check out the PHP Abstract homepage for links to even more great shows (29 episodes strong!)

I'm trying to use PHP 5.2 to talk to Skype via the COM extension and Skype4COM interface.

I'm using this example from the Skype Forum, but I get a COM exception of "Skype client is not installed."

He also points to someone else with the problem, but still hasn't quite found a solution. Anyone want to help?