On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article/tutorial showing how to keep things in sync on your Drupal installation with the help of Adobe AIR.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).

Larry Garfield talks about a new feature of Drupal 7 in a new post to his blog - the new introspective code registry that's been introduced in this latest version.

As a GHOP Task , Cornil did a performance analysis of Drupal and found its two largest performance drains were the bootstrap process and the theming layer. Quite simply, Drupal spends too much time including code. [...] Fortunately, Drupal 7's self-learning code registry system has just landed, which should obliterate most of the wasted bootstrap cost.

Larry describes the "heart of it all", the token_get_all call, that parses through an entire PHP file, splitting out things like classes included and functions called. This is passed through a function_exists call to the current script and, if it's already there, the file isn't included repetitively.

PHPEveryDay.com has posted a few more tutorials today covering configuring Drupal for your site:

• Drupal Configuration: Site Maintenance
• Drupal Configuration: File System
• Drupal Configuration: Boosting performance by Caching
• Drupal Configuration: Setting Date and Time
• Drupal Configuration: Looking Error Report Log
• Drupal Configuration: Error Handling
• Drupal Configuration: General Setting
• Drupal Configuration: Login to Administration Page

Check out PHPEveryDay for more great PHP-related tutorials.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted his take on some of the killer PHP projects that are out there:

Part of PHP's power is actually found in the variety of open source (free to use) PHP based applications. I'm talking about things like blogs, web frameworks, forums, CMS' etc. I was just thinking, that a list of 'killer' PHP open source projects would be useful

There four on his list so far - WordPress, the Zend Framework, Drupal and Punbb.

To be totally honest about it, we've seen much of the good stuff coming out of the PHP world, in the last few years. PHP developers are leap-frogging ahead with regards to their level of skill and the quality of code they produce.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted this new guide on how to install one of the more popular PHP content management systems out there - Drupal.

One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to install and configure a brand-new Drupal Web site from scratch. We will also touch upon the basics of adding content to a Drupal installation.

They include useful screenshots along the way as well, helping to guide you through the process a bit better than with just words. There's tons of configuration options that you could mess with in a Drupal installation, but they do well to give you the essential ones that you'll need to get it up and running smoothly.

The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new post from Matthew Magain spotlighting the release of the latest version of one of the more popular PHP CMS systems out there - Drupal 6.

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

Scott Klarr has pulled together a listing of the top cheat sheets that he's found out there relating to PHP (and things surrounding it) like:

• this one from blueshoes.org
• a sheet covering filtering and escaping
• a Smarty cheat sheet
• a few covering WordPress
• and ones covering CakePHP and Drupal

Check out his page for more (and thumbnails for each).

Packt Publishing has announced this year's winners for the CMS awards with categories such as "most promising", "best PHP CMS" and the "best open source social networking CMS".

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Following on from the success of 2006, Packt has expanded the Award for 2007 with an increase in prize money and the addition of new categories.

The top three on the Overall Open Source CMS category were (in rank descending) - Drupal, Joomla! and CMS Made Simple. Check out their feature article for more details on Drupal's win.