In this post from his blog, Justin Silverton takes a quick look back at the November meeting of a few of the main PHP developers on what needs to happen in PHP6.

In November of 2005, the major developers working on the core of PHP met up in Paris and discussed various additions that would possibly make version 6.

Attendees included Wez Furlong, Derick Rethans, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Zeev Suraski and some of the topics that were discussed included: filename encoding, optimizing the use of brackets in strings, and register_globals.

Of course, some of these issues have already been worked out of the PHP builds and will be coming to a web server near you with a whole new feel.

Chris Shiflett has posted this new item on his blog today with his look back at his year in 2005 - both personal and community related.

In the tradition of my 2003 and 2004 highlights, I'm posting my personal highlights of 2005. As in years past, this is mainly for my own benefit. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2006.

Some of the more memorable things on his list include:

• the launch of the PHP Security Consortium
• the launch of his consulting company, BrainBulb
• made numerous speeches
• completed his second book, PHPDecurity.org, a companion to it

Overall, a great year...he also includes some of the things that he'd like to do in the next year as well (speak at fewer conferences, contribute more to open source, etc).

Nexen.net points to their latest PHP statistics (in French) for the end of last year - December 2005.

Here's the latest statistics on the usage of PHP for December 2005:

• PHP 5.x usage grows up to 5% (at the same pace as months before). The release of PHP 5.1 seemed to have no effect.
• PHP 4.4.4 continues to enjoy strong use, despite the differences between it and older versions like 4.3.10 and 4.3.11.

Also this month, you can see some of the graphs representing other various stats since June 2005.

Some of the other items they measure include: adoption by country, number of servers running it by country, and the adoption of PHP in Canada for the month. Note: the page is all in French, but the graphs are easy to understand...

Derick Rethans has posted his own look back at all of the happenings that went on back in 2005.

Welcome to the fourth installment of the PHP Look Back. Just as in previous years, we'll look back on PHP development discussions, bloopers and accomplishments of the last year. This is not supposed to be a fully objective review of last year--note that the opinions in this article are that of the author, and not of the PHP development team.

He covers each month, giving the happenings for each month, linking to various posts and items in each one. Most of the things discussed are more related to the internal PHP development and discusssions from the mailing lists.

In an effort to know where the PHP community has been (and where it will be going), I've posted this lengthy summary over on our blog today with a look back at what made up 2005 for all of the PHPers out there.

Well, here it is, the end of another year and it's times like thes ethat it's always fun to take a look back to where we've come from and how far we've made it on various projects. The PHP community has come so far from those early days of January, and I thought I'd take my own look back via some of the news posts that I've made over on PHPDeveloper.org in the past year (almost 2000 of em) and see which ones stuck out. So, bear with me on this - I know I'll miss a few of the biggies, but I'm going to try to highlight things in each month that really effected the community as a whole.

So, enjoy the read - most of the highlights are there (as well as a few of the problems that happened along the way). Hope you enjoy - and have a happy new year!

The latest edition of php|architect has been released today - the December 2005 issue.

Included in this edition are the following:

• Special Feature: Where in the World is PHP? - an overview of how PHP stands currently (the sample article for this month)
• PHP Web Services - a look at them with a focus on SOAP
• Advanced SQLite Development - more than just the casual use

...and much, much more, including the cover story "An Introduction to Drupal". So, head over and grab your issue today - either through the savings you get through a subscription, or the grat price of a single issue!

There's a pointer on Nexen.net today that leads to the latest issue of the French PHP magazine, Direction|PHP.

In this issue, they talk about:

• Stored procedures and functions in MySQL
• Advanced Development with SQLite
• Logging and Monitoring with log4php
• and an Interview with Marc Delisle

Check out the full description for all of the contents in this issue. Plus, there's a link to the sample article for this month, "Logging and Monitoring with log4php".

Chris Shiflett has his own wrapup posted today for the ApacheCon 2005 conference that just finished.

Despite the heavy emphasis on Java at this year's ApacheCon, I still enjoyed the conference and learned a lot.

I got to see Rasmus Lerdorf's talk, and you can also view his slides online: Large-Scale PHP. Rasmus actually covered many topics, including Ajax, Flickr, and Yahoo Maps. It felt like he was just having fun and talking about the cool things he's been playing with recently. You can see more of his toys on his toys page, which is the closest thing he has to a blog.

He also mentions some of the other "standard presenters" and their presentations, like:

• Andrei Zmievski on Unicode
• Adam Trachtenburg on Web Services
• Christian Wenz on Web Application Security

Be sure to check out his photo gallery as well for some shots of the conference...

DynamicWebPages.de has this new post today with a look at the latest PHP statistics showing the usage up to November 2005.

Back in October, the overall use of PHP decreased slightly, but there's been an upward surge in November to compensate. The numbers for the domains using PHP rose to about 220,526 (for a total of about 22.2 million) and the number of servers using PHP rose by 11 (for a total of 12.8 million). According to Security Space, the popularity of the PHP module in Apache installations saw a bit of a decrease - 0.6 percent. Of course, it's still the most popular module for Apache users/installations. The TIOBE Programming Index gives PHP a slight decrese of 1.76 percent, but that changes nothing in its placement on the list - still holding at 4th.

You can check out the complete stats here...

Damien Seguy wrote in today to let us know that he's posted the latest PHP stats over on Nexen.net today.

I just published the latest PHP stats:

• PHP 4.4.x show impressive growth during last month, taking scores of web sites from PHP 4.3.11 and 4.3.10. Users are migrating in spite of BC break.
• PHP 5.x rises again, almost reaching 5%, following the trend of the previous monthes. PHP 5.1, published late during the month, had no time to have impact.
• PHP keep it's level of usage even with complex architectures: domains covering 2 or more IP are even showing a slightly higher usage of PHP: 1% to 38% of total.

There's much more posted on the page, including some graphs showing a very large presence of PHP on the internet, how many users are using what versions, and where the highest concentrations of PHP usage are (by country).