Stefan Koopmanschap has an excellent new post to his blog about some of the ideas and contributions he's made to help the phpBB community move closer to their goal move to the Symfony framework.

At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.

He talks some about each community, what they're all about and how this coming together might effect each side. He does list a some of the positive side effects of this collaboration - things like more skilled developers, providing a good solid use case for the framework and easier integration of the forum into a pre-existing site. He also includes a few ways for those interested to help out with the project.

On the TutToaster site today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create an entire PHP forum completely from scratch using PHP and a MySQL backend.

The code I'll show is exactly the same than the one you can download, except for some comments. In the original project you'll have everything well documented (using phpDocumentor). [...] This project doesn't follow a MVC pattern, but we'll use classes and try to separate the different functionalities.

They walk you through the creation of the database (a "posts" table) and how to organize the file structure, configuration, making the header and footer as well as the classes to do things like database connections, validation and creating the output (view) as well as working with the posts itself.

Josh Holmes has a new post to his blog today about the inclusion of a new piece of software into Microsoft's Web Application Gallery - phpBB, the popular forum software.

Well, it's official '" the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives you a very simple wizard to walk through.

With the Platform Installer, handling most of the dependencies is all done for you and installing this very popular application onto your site or local machine is just a few clicks away. This phpBB install requires that you use PHP 5.2.13 and SQL Server. This package was pulled together by a group at the JumpIn Camp that happened recently.

On the php|architect blog Keith Casey has a new post that suggests something a bit counterintuitive to what a lot of developers think about their code - less code isn't always better.

Everyone says "I could build that in an afternoon/weekend/marathon session of caffeine-fueled code-debauchery" but to actually do something well, unsurprisingly, it usually takes longer.

He gives an example of this forum script that's under 1KB of code (949 bytes or so) and has some of the basic features of any forum software out there. Keith talks about the software - the features included, the included security, how it uses quotes to its advantage and how it only uses the basic functionality of PHP to make it all work.

Keith also includes a few criticisms of the code like how it uses short tags, the lack of linebreaks, using $_REQUEST and a few more.

To be blunt, it's not pretty and doesn't have many features, but honestly, I fluctuate between terrified and impressed by the feat. [...] More than anything, it's refreshing and fascinating to see what someone can do when they set clear, simple, direct priorities and focus exclusively on those.

Dougal Campbell has posed a question about the popular WordPress blogging system concerning an interesting use for it that seems to be popping up more - using it as a forum.

I know there are some efforts to integrate forums with WordPress. [...] The main problem with external forum systems (as opposed to solutions purely based on plugins and themes) is that if you want a consistent look-and-feel between your blog and your forums, you have to do a lot of work.

WordPress, endlessly themeable, can be made to look like a forum, but that's not what he's talking about here. He wants feedback from other developers out there on the approaches they're taking to get WordPress to cooperate this way. There's over thirty comments on the post now with some great feedback from all around the community - check them out!

On NETTUTS.com there's a (quite complete) tutorial posted that walks you through the creation of a forum using PHP and MySQL as a backend to store the posts.

In this tutorial, we're going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage.

They start with the backend and move their way forward, setting up the MySQL tables - categories, replies, users and topics. They describe each of them in a bit more detail before getting into the code. They show how to create template for the site (with a little CSS) and include code to create users, authenticate them, set up their permission levels, making categories/topics and much more.

The full code for the forum application they've created can be downloaded here.

Richard Thomas has added two more quick posts in his "Solar Shorts" series spotlighting the Solar framework:

• Solar Framework Shorts - Model to Form the quick way - An example of creating an auto-generated form based on a simple user model (with the controller and view code included).
• Solar Framework Shorts - Talk with the Solar Gods - A pointer to the IRC channel and discussion forums where you can interact directly with the development team and other Solar fans.

You can find out more about the framework itself on SolarPHP.com and more community information (and a project wiki) on the SolarPHP.org website.

PHPFreaks.com has posted this new information about running PHP on a Windows 2008 Server instance and how you can give it a try for thirty days.

Microsoft has been recently engaging in a number of open source projects. They have been working on enhancing performance, security and stability of PHP applications on Windows Server platforms. [...] In cooperation with Microsoft, [we] invite you to trial a Windows based web stack consisting of IIS 7, PHP 5 and SQL Server. Via the PHP on WS 2008 website you will be able to request a 30-day trial with a Microsoft hosting partner

By signing up, you can request a trial of the IIS 7 software. They also provide a Q&A discussion board for those participating in the program that might need any help.

The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We're delighted to announce the winner of our "I am" competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence "I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that's not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.