Janos Rusiczki has released a library for CodeIgniter that makes integration of the Postmark service simple.

What are transactional e-mails, you might ask? The answer is: e-mails generated by a web application after an user action such as registration, requesting a password reminder, receiving a reply to a comment, etc. The problem me and many developers faced is that sometimes the client's servers are blacklisted and these e-mails land in the users' spam folder. This is where Postmark comes to the rescue, hopefully.

The Postmark API accepts JSON encoded content via a POST request that includes the to, from, message (plain text or HTML) and an API key. The Postmark service is currently in closed beta but you can still grab the library from either this direct download or on its github repository.

As mentioned on the Suhosin blog today, the latest patch for the PHP 5.3 edition of PHP (it's a beta) has been released:

Because the new features of Suhosin Patch contains new code and some hacks I release the BETA version of the new Suhosin Patch to the public and hope people will test it in different OS/CPU/... and mail me the results to . The patch can be downloaded here.

Issues considered in this new patch version include the support for environment variables that let you configure how certain parts of the patch work (like memory handing and canary violation handling).

As Lauren Cooney mentions in a new entry to her blog, Microsoft has launched a new version of their Web Platform Installer - now including PHP!

Why do I need this? Well, first of all, this version of the WebPI installs the community version of PHP. Additionally, instead of going to several different websites to download and install Microsoft's web products, you can now seamlessly and quickly install them from one website - and you can update them from this website as well. This is the simplicity we have been aiming for - one website, one download, and simple updates to the best products for building web solutions.

The Installer includes a "Community Version" of PHP rather than a customized "Microsoft version" that allows for current PHP applications to be ported to the environment easily. Their Windows Web Application Gallery has also been updated with several new PHP-based applications that can be dropped right into the WebPI environment and used. You can find out the details about all of this (and more) on the Microsoft Web Platform site.

Zend has officially announced the opening of a public beta of a new product of theirs called Zend Server. Here's what the Zend Developer Zone has to say about it:

Zend Server is designed to be a all-in-one installer to get setup quickly with Apache, PHP, Zend Framework, and a PHP optimizer. It also comes with an admin UI to configure PHP easily. It uses native installers for various operating systems, and is available for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux (.deb, .rpm or tarball).

The Server comes in two flavors - the full edition and a lighter "CE" edition. The server comes with built-in features like page caching, system and website monitoring and support (with hot fixes). You can find out more about this new offering over on the Zend.com website.

Lukas Smith asks developers a question in his latest blog post: "Is your chosen framework on the PHP primary tester mailing list?"

This is a question you should be asking the developers of the framework you are using. Same of course goes for any PHP application you care about. [...] We announce all PHP releases on this list (actually until now we have only announced RC's, but we are expanding this to also cover alpha and beta releases).

He suggests that subscribing to this list simplifies the process of keeping up with the latest releases of PHP and gives them a chance to report back with any issues they might find with them.

Every release runs the risk of BC breaks, intentional or not. Projects that want to make life easy for their users participate actively in the process of testing PHP releases. It makes the life of the PHP developers a lot easier .. and who doesn't want to make their life's easier?

Matthew Turland has posted a call to action for all of those PHP developers out there content to sit back and just request features for the language - get up and get involved!

A question that seems to be popping up more and more these days is, "When will PHP 6 be released?" It's especially annoying because the people that enjoy an exercise in futility ask this question are the same people that simply refuse to take WIR [When it's ready] for an answer. Or maybe they just read into the hype generated by trigger-happy publishers who want to preempt a stable release, I don't really know.

He points out some of the current stats - PHP 5.3's beta release date as coming to the original date, that PHP 6 code hasn't even been moved outside of CVS and the amount of work left to be done on it before its even close to being ready. This is where you come in - the internals folks contribute their time (off-hours usually) to developing the language and can only do so much:

So respect them and their time and stop asking when it's going to be ready, because they don't really know much better [about PHP6] than you do.

He also suggests two other things that you can do to keep up with the current state of development - keep your version updated and track the RFCs to see what features are being added and any bugs that might still be open for pre-release. You have to be proactive about keeping up with the current status - otherwise, you have no room to ask, over and over, "when will it be done?"

The first step towards a full, stable release of the next version of PHP - 5.3 - has officially been made - the first beta (PHP 5.3beta1) has been released and is now available for download.

The biggest change is dropping of OO functionality in closures as full OO support for closures is planed for a later release than PHP 5.3.0. See http://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures/removal-of-this. This release marks the begin of a feature freeze and bug fix only phase. If in doubt whether your change is a bugfix please run it by Lukas and me.

You can download the packages here:

• tar.bz archive
• tar.gz archive
• Winodws builds

Jeff Rubinoff from Sun has passed along a link to a developer blog they're hosting covering the development of their NetBeans for PHP project's latest advancements.

We at Sun have been working on a PHP editor in NetBeans IDE. The first full-featured version will go out in our 6.5 release, scheduled for November, but it's available for use already in our daily builds. [...] We're not PHP developers, strictly speaking, we're developing a tool for PHP developers. However, we are trying to get as much feedback from PHP developers as possible.

The blog already has tons of content - tutorials, software updates, screencasts, personal experiences - all covering the development of the next version (beta download) of the PHP tools in NetBeans.

In a new blog entry Lukas Smith notes that the latest alpha release, version 2, of the PHP 5.3 series is now available for download from the PHP QA website.

If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions). [...] Aside from a few additions, it was mainly bug fixing in this release. The biggest changes happened in the fileinfo extension.

The Windows infrastructure has been moved off on its own with lots of different binaries to choose from. The next version could either be another alpha release or make the jump up to beta - feedback for the aplha2 and the namespacing inclusion will make that determination.

In this new post to the symfony blog, there's an update on the framework's latest version, Propel integration and the addition of the sfDoctrinePlugin.

After more that two years of development, the Propel team has released Propel 1.3 yesterday. This is a great achievement as Propel 1.3 sports a lot a new exciting features.

These features include PDO integration, object instance pooling, improvements to the date handling features and the addition of more default values for database schemas. There's also the updates with Doctrine:

As announced in the symfony 1.2 roadmap, Doctrine 1.0 will be officially supported and the sfDoctrinePlugin will be bundled with symfony 1.2. Doctrine 1.0 beta1 has been released two weeks ago and the Doctrine team will release Doctrine 1.0 final on September 1st.