The PHPBuilder staff was saddened to learn that the founder of our site, Tim Perdue, passed away on September 16 , 2011, after a battle with cancer. At only 37 years of age, Tim's passing came much too soon, but his contributions to the PHP and open source communities assure him a lasting legacy.

Related posts include this tribute from his company, GForge and this article from Jake Ludington on LockerGnome. Digging through our own archives, I found this interview with him back in 2002 (an archive.org link, the original is no longer there).

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge. By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system. It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

His post also includes some of the changes made in the latest release (0.1.0) and how you can clone the code from the SF.net repository.

• Best Project
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers
• Best Project for the Enterprise

If you'd like to help the framework (and the team behind it) win an award in this year's competition, head over and vote for them in each of the three categories.

I made a web interface for runing PHPUnit test suites and seeing the results in a cool environment of AJAX. Features Runing speciffic tests or whole suite, seeing the errors and thrown exceptions connected to the test that thrown them, ability to see the code coverage result for the test suite. All these done in an interactive interface allowing run of the tests where the user can not interract with the system command line (web server). The software is totally free.

You can find complete details about the tool (and downloads) on its SourceForge page (as well as donate if you like it!)

The awards program allows the community to recognize open source software projects that are built with the highest quality, creativity and ingenuity. [...] Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party, held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA, starting at 6:00 pm PT on the night of July 23rd, during the week of OSCON.

PHP-related nominations include the web2project web-based project management solution and the Symfony framework (in a few different categories).

The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento is a very popular eCommerce application that makes setting up an online shop quick and easy. It's well designed and has been nominates to several community spots like "Best Project for the Enterprise" and "Most Likely to Change the World".

Time 2.0 is focused on intranet collaboration and is a rewrite of the eGroupWare project (a collaboration suite allowing for instant access of any data from just about anywhere there's an internet connection).

You can cast your vote for these and other great community projects by logging in to SourceForge and selecting your favorites from the lists.

According to the press release from SF about their OpenID support:

OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we're happy to be jumping into it. it's bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. [...] We've spent the past couple weeks on it - integrating the Zend Framework OpenID component into our site code. we like the framework as a whole and I personally hope to use more of it in the future.

There might be a few kinks in the process, so if you're seeing issues with your OpenID working on their site, check out the FAQ they've posted to help.

To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable [...] it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

It also supports output of other data in a "pretty format" like backtraces, included files and a listing of all constants. You can check out a demo of it in action here.

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.

The Community Choice Awards are over! The SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards provided you an opportunity to recognize projects that stand taller than the rest. Everybody got to vote, and everybody's vote counted equally. The winning projects, each with superlative quality, productivity, and ingenuity, represent the cream of the crop on SourceForge.net.

phpBB made the cut in the "Best Project for Communications" category and phpMyAdmin won in the "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins". Congratulations to both projects on your achievement!