Derick Rethans, realizing that he wasn't ready to jump back into a full-time position just yet has decided to refocus his efforts on helping make PHP a better place with work on PECL extensions and on internals-related issues.

Instead I will be available to work on (custom) PHP extensions and internals related issues. Extensions are a great way around PHP's limitations and performance issues.

His first project is a QuickHash extension to interface with the popular StumbleUpon and works more efficiently by using more clearly defined data structures. There's no stable release yet, but keep an eye on the subversion repository for the latest enhancements.

On the Perplexed Labs blog there's a recent post looking at how to fork processes in PHP with the help of the pcntl_fork function and the process management extension.

Let's say you want to take advantage of more than one core for a given process. Perhaps it performs many intensive computations and on a single core would take an hour to run. Since a PHP process is single threaded you won't optimally take advantage of the available multi-core resources you may have. Fortunately, via the Process Control (PCNTL) extension, PHP provides a way to fork new child processes.

He gives a quick snippet of code showing how to spawn off a few new processes, get their process IDs and watches a max number of children until one dies (then starts another).

Alvaro Videla has submitted a new post he's written up combining PHP and Erlang yet again, but this time he's using it to just store key/value pairs rather than for session data.

In this post I want to show you some of the neat things that can be done with the PHP-Erlang Bridge extension: A Key Value Store. Erlang comes packed with a Key Value store in the form of the ETS module. This is database is pretty fast and efficient for storing the Erlang terms in memory.

He tried a proof of concept to see how well the system would respond and was able to push over 150k items into the storage in one second. Sample code and instructions on getting the bridge working are included in the post.

Michael Maclean has a look at working with fonts in Cairo (a graphics manipulation extension in the PECL repository). The example will be added to the PHP manual too in case you need it for reference later.

Currently, in PECL/Cairo the only way to draw text is the referred to as the "toy" text API, which is a very basic way of handling text compared to the facilities available in the Cairo library itself. However, it's sufficient for most purposes that I've come across so far.

With the first versions of the Cairo extension, you had to use the selectFontFace method to choose the font you wanted. With the introduction of Cairo 0.2.0, you can now use FreeType font support instead and can use the streams API built into PHP to locate the resource. A snippet of code is included to show how that would work.

Alex Netkachov has a new post for those using one of the popular content management systems out there and who might be looking for some resources to find some good extensions for them.

No matter how long you keep a web site, if you update it frequently, holding a community, or taking care of it in any other way, at any moment idea of changing or improve its functionality may come to your mind. If you are not a software developer then you have two options: find the developer that will do it for you or try to find extension for the CMS of your site that changes it in the way you want.

He offers a few tips on finding the right extension for your site and needs like looking out for extensions that aren't really extensions and checking the release date to make sure it's current. He also includes a few links to some of the larger CMS extension sites for Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Joomla and DotNetNuke.

Derick Rethans has posted about some new browser extensions for the popular PHP-based debugger Xdebug. These are to replace the helper that is no longer available on FireFox's site (download).

Years ago I wrote about a Firefox extension that allows you to start an Xdebug debugging session by clicking on an icon in Firefox' status bar. For some unexplained reason, this extension is no longer available through Firefox' addon-site. [...] There are now a few other browser extensions that do the same thing.

He lists three new extensions that can most of what you'd need to keep your testing going - easy Xdebug, Xdebug enabler (for Chrome) and this blog post with a pure Javascript method done with bookmarklets.

Ryan Mauger has a new post today looking at how to combine the Tidy extension for PHP and Firebug with a Zend Framework application to keep your HTML neat and valid with a handy bit of feedback for debugging.

With Zend Framework there is an easy way to ensure that you always create valid HTML in your applications. This involves the use of a simple Front Controller Plugin, and the php Tidy component. [...] So you can use tidy for filtering user input, what about using it to effectivly clean my documents and ensure my output is always valid?

He starts off with the pieces of the puzzle you'll need - the front controller plugin for the Zend Framework application, using the Tidy extension to filter your HTML and combining the two to make a dispatchShutdown() call to make the transformations. Firebug comes in to help with logging the issues Tidy found so you can correct them.

Vid Luther has posted a guide for getting the latest version of SSH working as a PHP extension on your Snow Leopard installation.

Getting PHP with SSH support is not an easy task in Snow Leopard. If you need it, here's a hackish way to do it, until Sara or Mike get around to patching the ssh2 in PECL.

You'll need Xcode and Brew to follow along with his example. He shows you how to set things set up (fail the pecl install), patch that failed file with the patch here and make/make install and you should have a nice shared object (.so) you can now install into your PHP instance.

Dennis sent in a submission about a toolbar he's created to work with the Zend Debugger (in an extension) for the Chrome Browser:

Since i have not yet seen an official extension for chrome (or i have not looked hard enough), i created one so i don't have to switch back to Firefox all the time, while I wait for the official extension. It only has the basic functionality (debug, debug next, profile and some configuration options) and it probably has some bugs and quirks, but it functions fine for me.

You can download this toolbar from here and if you have issues installing it, you might check out this post on the Zend Forums.

In a recent tutorial from NETTUTS.com Burak Guzel shows you how to get the most out of using the curl extension with PHP to handle things like remote requests, file uploads and handling multiple curl requests at the same time.

cURL is a tool for transferring files and data with URL syntax, supporting many protocols including HTTP, FTP, TELNET and more. Initially, cURL was designed to be a command line tool. Lucky for us, the cURL library is also supported by PHP. In this article, we will look at some of the advanced features of cURL, and how we can use them in our PHP scripts.

He starts off with the basics, making a request and getting some information about the connection, before moving on to some more complex features - detecting redirection, POSTing values to a remote site and the creation of a WordPress link checker.