Padraic Brady has an addendum he's posted to his "making a blogging application with the Zend Framework" series dealing with a few random issues from along the way.

The interesting thing about live publishing of a long tutorial series is that it's not flawless. In fact it's the opposite. [...] To cover all these I'll occasionally highlight the more important ones both in notes to new entries, or where they slip past me, in Addendum entries like this one.

There's four sections in this update - one dealing with the referencing of base URLs, another worrying about magic_quotes settings, an updated database schema for the project and the final about removing non-english characters in the title URLs.

Nexen.net has a new look today at something most people take for granted - some of the default extensions loaded (and how often they are) in a PHP installation.

Since PHP 5.2.3 has been published, over 9700 tests were sent to the Quality Assurance Team. In those tests reports, we can find the list of failed tests, and an anonymous PHPinfo(), that helps the PHP team to understand the origin of the errors. With such a number of phpinfo(), it is tempting to get some stats about compilation choices.

Damien has graphed out a few different data sets - the extensions included in most default installations, other popular extensions that may or may not be compiled in, the list of rare extensions (a long list) and how often they show up and, finally, the graphing of all extensions included in any PHP install anywhere. Links to more information about these extensions can be found immediately following the graph.

From the PHP-Coding-Practices.com website today, there's a new post that, using a tip from this article on BarelyFitz, shows how to control CSS information with PHP.

Today I stumbled upon a cool article that explains how one can control one's CSS colors via PHP to former relative shades. How is this done I hear you asking? Just look at the following code.

His example uses the tutorial's csscolor class and shows how to implement it with a base color and a highlight color and use it to generate variations of the same shades.

Stephan Schmidt has posted some thoughts about type hinting in PHP5 (what's there) and the same kind of functionality for objects in PHP6 (what's to come).

I was very pleased, that PHP 5 introduced type hints, although they are not available for primitives like string, int, boolean, etc. Still, I'd like to see the object type hint introduced in any future version of PHP that allows me to specify, that a method or function only accepts an object, regardless of the type of the object.

He gives the example of Java's handling of the functionality and what PHP does with the same type of code. He also mentions that, via the Reflection API extension, some of this is possible already, so why not just include it from here on out?

The PEAR group is happy to announce the release of the latest version of the popular package system for PHP - PEAR 1.5.0. Changes in the new version include extension enabling in php.ini, implementing TAP output option for run-tests command, recognize deprecated package/channel and display to user, and much more.

The community is also talking about the release:

• Greg Beaver's discussion of how this new version is "pushing the envelope".
• A release announcement from the International PHP Magazine website.

You can get the full information on this new release from the PEAR website or just head straight to the download page and grab the update.

David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.

It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.

Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.

He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.

The PHPBase project has been released and is in the alpha stages currently.

PhpBase is a set of Open Source PHP classes and functions aimed to help developers submitting their data to Google Base.

The main purpose for a tool like this is the need to keep data submissions accurate and avoid common errors that might occur when submitting to standard schemes recommended by Google.

The code still in development, and will be added to a subversion repository once we get the project approved at berlios.de.

You can check out the main site here or just download the current version directly...