As Paul Jones mentions in this new post to his blog the Aura project, a PHP framework, originally targeted at PHP 5.3 has changed its direction a bit - they've shifted from a focus on PHP 5.3 to the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

When I initially announced the Aura project, it was targeted at PHP 5.3. With a stable release of PHP 5.4 impending, we have moved the target to PHP 5.4. In addition, we have made 1.0.0-beta1 releases of almost all the component packages. (See an earlier announcement from Hari KT.)

The components include: a dependency injection container, an autoloader and a view system that are all self-contained with no other dependencies. You can find the complete code for these containers (and one for combining them all into a single system) on the project's github page.

The PHP.net site has a new announcement about the latest version of the language in the PHP 5.4.x series - beta 2 has been released for testing.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second beta release of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] Please help us to identify bugs by testing new features and looking for unintended backward compatibility breaks, so we can fix the problems and fully document intended changes before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker.

Remember - this is not a production release, so do not use it in your live applications (unless you really like to live dangerously, of course). You can look at the NEWS file for a complete list of changes.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today about the release of the latest version (3.0 beta) of the SQL Server drivers for PHP. This new release includes three improvements - buffered queries, support for LocalDB and support for high availability/disaster recovery.

A Community Technology Preview (a beta release) of v3.0 of the SQL Server Drivers for PHP was released today (see the announcement on the team blog). You can download it here: Download v3.0 of the SQL Server Drivers for PHP. [...] It's important to note that the latter two features are dependent on the next version of SQL Server (code named "Denali"). A preview of Denali can be downloaded for free here (see notes later in this article about the installation process): Download SQL Server Denali CTP 3.

He gives brief summaries (some with example code) of what these three new features have to offer those using SQL Server in their applications. The "buffered queries" allows you to bring your entire result set into memory, making it simpler to interact with as rows/columns. The LocalDB support gives developers a quick way to have a database without the hassle of a server - just connect right to the SQL Server database file. The high availability feature has been included for a while but has a new name in the upcoming release - SQL Server Always On.

Christian Stocker has a quick new post on the Liip blog today about an easy way to test the PHP 5.4 beta on your OS X-based platform with a simple package install and symlink.

Since the first beta of the next major release of PHP was released a few days ago, I thought we could provide packages for people who'd like to test it and see if there software is still running. And make adjustments or report bugs, if it doesn't. Complaining after the official stable release was made is usually too late, so testing your software against beta releases is very important. For your project and for PHP.

The install involves grabbing their package from the Liip server and calling the "packager.py" executable to make the version swap. You can go back to the pre-installed PHP5 version anytime by updating the symlink back. If you want more information on the package (or to report bugs) you can find the project over in github.

The PHP development team has released the latest beta version of the PHP 5.4.x series for testing - 5.4.0beta1.

Release candidates are development packages released to check if any critical problems have slipped into the code during the previous development period. Release candidates are NOT for production use, they are for testing purposes only even though in most cases there are almost no differences between the general availability (GA) release and the last RC. You can help the PHP Team and yourself detect problems by installing and testing release candidates on your own (non-production!) server.

You're encouraged to compile this version on your platform and include the "make test" command in the process to report any issues found directly back to the PHP dev group. Windows users can find the latest binaries over on windows.php.net.

Stuart Herbert has a new post to his blog today that shares some helpful hints about dependency quirks that can come with using PEAR packages and the PEAR installer.

To save myself a bit of effort, I thought it would make sense to make my API client reuse PEAR's existing HTTP_Request2 component. No sense in re-inventing the wheel, I thought. But that's where my troubles began. [...] There are a few quirks in the way that the PEAR installer handles version numbers, and you need to know how to deal with them if you're going to re-use PEAR project components in your own apps.

He shows how a dependency can be set up for the HTTP_Request2 package as a part of the update to his project. He talks about changes to the project's package.xml file and the trick with version numbering to get the latest. In this case, the latest is a non-stable alpha/beta component and the package.xml file needs some special handling to cooperate there (version, stability, release, api and min/max).

Phil Sturgeon has made a new post to his blog today introducing the framework he and a few other developers have been working up - FuelPHP, a PHP 5.3 framework.

Like CodeIgniter, FuelPHP will be keeping things simple but moving to a better PHP 5 syntax. Sounds like Kohana right? Well... kinda. Kohana got a lot of things right in 2.x but the 3.x re-write was a confusing one. [...] odeIgniter and Kohana are the two main frameworks FuelPHP is based around but all of the base code is original with only some small parts sourced from other places. We have taken a few ideas from Rails for parts like code generation but this will not be a huge complicated convention-based framework. The idea is if we can improve on CodeIgniter and Kohana a little then we already have a player in the world of frameworks.

He talks about the other members of the development team (Jelmer Schreuder and Harro Verton) as well as some of the cool features about the framework like its cascading file system, its use of HMVC, packages and the "oil" command line utility (that lets you do simple migrations).

In this new post to his blog Brian Swan talks about a tool that's been released by the IIS Team at Microsoft to make it even simpler to run multiple versions of PHP under IIS - the PHP Manager.

Not only does the PHP Manager make it a no-brainer to run different PHP versions side-by-side on IIS, it makes it easy to register PHP with IIS, configure various PHP settings, enable/disable PHP extensions, remotely manage PHP configuration via the php.ini file, and check the PHP runtime configuration and environment (i.e. see the output of phpinfo()).

Brian goes through a six step process to use this new tool to set up both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 versions on an IIS server. It's as simple as installing the tool, registering new PHP versions and customizing the configurations. They'd love feedback on the tool so leave them comments here or report bugs here.

Kevin Schroder has posted a new announcement to his blog today about Zend's need for "beta testers" for the latest version of their PHP Certification exam (the 5.3 version).

Zend has recently teamed up with several of the top people in the PHP community to offer the PHP 5.3 Certification. It will be coming out in a few months, but before we can do that we need beta testers. That means YOU! If you want to participate all you need to do is fill out a quick qualification survey. These are the questions you will be asked (fill them out on the link, not on this page).

The survey will be open until July 15th (2010) and will ask you questions about your experience level with PHP overall and with PHP 5.3 as well as how much of your day is devoted to PHP and what best describes your role. If you'd like to give your feedback, go over and fill out the survey and get your name in.

In a recent post to his blog Phil Sturgeon mentions a service (cloud hosting) specifically targeted towards CodeIgniter users that's recently announced their private beta - CloudIgniter.

Ever wanted to install PyroCMS or set up a CodeIgniter playground but don't know what the hell you are doing? The wonderful new hosting service CloudIgniter does it all for you. The service is currently in private beta but I have been using it for a while and it seems perfectly stable.

Phil mentions one of the "killer features" of the service that puts it head and shoulders above other hosting - the one-click install of CodeIgniter-based applications (currently there's two of them). It also has a lot of the usual features like daily backups, automatic Google Apps MX records and pre-configured database installations along with the normal ssh/ftp sort of access. He also points out a "hidden gem" of being able to deploy your site with git as well.

If you're interested in trying it out, sign up for the beta and they'll let you know when things are all set up.