Yesterday afternoon, Zend released their latest PHP Weekly Summary for this week. This one spotlights a few interesting things, including: PHP 4.3.0 + the Zend Encoder (and the changes it made), the Call for Papers for the International PHP Conference, and some smaller changes to the MySQL module and DOMXML validation. The big news here is the release of PHP 4.3.0 alpha - which is going to be quite an improvement over some of the past versions. For the full listing of changes, check out the CHANGE file. Thanks to geoff for reminding me of this one.

Evolt.org has a new review of a book that several people/websites have already taken a look at by now - Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL. This is o'Reilly's contribution to the PHP & MySQL world, and this article just gives you a basic idea of what they cover in the book. Apparently, it's not a book for the seasoned professional, but more for someone who's had a little bit of an intro to PHP and wants to get more into the meat of the language. One good suggested use for this book: lend it to beginning developers working with you on PHP code to save time and frustration.

I'm sure that several of you, if you're signed up for the forums, recieved the email talking about the new XML search feature that the PHPDN is going to implement soon. Our hopes are that the search can be used and abused to find just the information that you're looking for - and that other sites, even if they aren't a part of the PHPDN could use it and maybe even contribute to the information it accesses. If you'd like to set up a script on your site that would work with our XML search, contact either me or Jason (PHPComplete.com) with more information about your site.