The symfony blog has start up their own "advent calendar" of sorts (similar to what they've done in previous years) - creating an entire application in a single month, from December 1st through 31st. This time its the jobeet.org jobs website. Here's the list of each day:

• Do you know Jobeet?
• Jobeet - Day 1: Starting up the Project
• Jobeet - Day 2: The Project
• Jobeet - Day 3: The Data Model

Stay tuned to the Symfony blog for more updates!

On the PHPBuilder.com site today there's a new tutorial talking about using PHP to dynamically create SVG images in a simple application.

As with many of the pages on my Web site, my SVG images are in fact generated by PHP scripts. I end up including many of the same images in other pages, but not always with the same size or colors, so making them customizable on a case-by-case basis is a useful thing. Attributes such as size, scale, colour, rotation, and position are obtained from arguments in the URL.

His example creates a SVG image using a class (UIControl) to create the content for the image. This content is dropped into the typical XML structure to display it. He also includes some extra attributes/methods you can use with the UIControl class to alter the resulting image.

On the NETTUTS.com website today Alex Villmann walks you through setting up a dedicated web server running Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

All great websites have a great server behind them. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up a dedicated web server (with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) using that old computer you have lying around the house and some free software.

The tutorial comes with plenty of screenshots for the Ubuntu install as well as the changes you'll need to make to the configuration files for the software to get things up and running. In the end you'll have a dedicated server you can drop anywhere and use to host your site.

According to this new article from Hiveminds magazine PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 are "at risk of becoming vaporware".

Today was supposed to see the release of PHP 5.3 Alpha 3. But it is not done and by the looks of the things that have not been done and the fact that no official release have come since Alpha 1 PHP risk becoming vaporware. Not vaporware in its true sense but in essence PHP 5.3 and PHP6 is on a similar road the PERL6 has taken.

According to them, PHP6 is at the same risk as Perl 6 with no roadmap and no vision and a "ready when its ready attitude" the developers seem to have. Of course, this isn't the case - there has been plenty of development work since alpha1 on PHP 5.3 (an alpha2 has even been released!). Maybe if the author of this article had done a bit more checking, they would have seen these things.

• Community News: php|tek 2008 Conference Schedule Posted
• Chris Shiflett's Blog: PHP Advent Calendar
• Paul Jones' Blog: What Does This Say About Unit-Testing in PHP Land?
• Karl Katzke's Blog: PHP: Symfony vs. Zend
• The Northclick Blog: Message Queue Project: First working version
• Developer.com: Graphing Data with PHP/SWF Charts
• Martynas Jusevicius' Blog: PHP 5 features: Class autoloading
• Andreas Gohr's Blog: DokuWiki on a Stick
• ProDevTips.com: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 6
• David Walsh's Blog: Using PHP Generic Objects To Organize Your Code
• Nessa's Blog: Installing suPHP on cPanel
• Making the Web Blog: Becoming PHP 6 Compatible
• Arnold Daniels' Blog: How I PHP: The Output Handler - Continued
• PHP Addiction Blog: PHP - No Container libraries?
• DevShed: Auto Loading Classes in PHP 5

Chuck Burgess has posted a discovery he made while working with Eclipse PDT and a command line script that he needed to debug:

This week, I found a need to do this same kind of remote debugging, but for a command-line PHP script. This seems to be something that Eclipse is not already designed to do, as there is no "perpetual listener" available for its debug client. Instructions for remote CLI debugging are available, which showed me that environment variables might be the missing link to getting it working with Eclipse. It turned out to be one of two missing links. The other link was tricking Eclipse into keeping a debug session open (and therefore "listening").

He found that by loading up the PHP file in a shell script with the XDEBUG_CONFIG and XDEBUG_SESSION variables defined, it allows the Eclipse listener to connect and work through the file like a normal web page request.

Evert Pot has a quick post showing how you can make your code fork MySQL connections for better performance.

For some of our long-running processes we use PHP. It makes total sense from our perspective, because we can re-use all our existing business logic from our main PHP web application. To make things more efficient, I recently started some work on using forks and have a couple of worker processes around.

His sample script makes use of the pcntl_fork and pcntl_wait functions in PHP to spawn off processes that will be closed off when no longer needed.

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial posted looking at two things that can cause headaches for PHP developers (especially when evaluating and comparing values) - nulls and empty strings.

Anyone who has programmed for any length of time has encountered the concepts of null and empty strings. They are not the same, and confusing the two can cause some serious problems. This article deals with these concepts in the context of PHP and MySQL.

They start with a bit of a quiz before getting into how to handle them correctly - making null "safe" and working with it correctly in a MySQL context. SQL statements and table structures are included for their examples.

Smashing Magazine has a few helpful RSS tips and tricks for WordPress users out there:

Let's take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing.

Here's their list:

• Control When Your Posts are Available via RSS
• Redirecting WordPress Feeds to FeedBurner Feeds
• Insert Ads (or Anything Else) in Your RSS Feed
• Format Your Images for Feed Readers
• Provide Your Readers with a Feed for Each Post
• Exclude Categories from Your RSS Feed
• Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog
• Use Category-Specific RSS Feeds
• List RSS Feeds by Category
• Get Rid of RSS Feeds the Clean Way

In this new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a quick look at a book by Julien Pauli and Guillaume Poncon - "Zend Framework: Bien developper en PHP".

Weighing in at around 450 pages, the contents table is replete with all the topics one would expect including chapters on MVC in the Zend Framework, all the typical components, and appendices (a lot of appendices!) on topics like MVC Theory, Subversion, Databases, Object Oriented Programming, Testing with PHPUnit, etc. It's a very complete book that should be suitable even for absolute beginners to PHP web application frameworks, or anyone visiting from Ruby/Python/Java.

You can find the book at a local (French) bookseller or it can be ordered online from someplace like Amazon.fr.