On the PEAR blog there's a new post talking about some of the things coming up in July that you might want to take note of.

There’s nothing quite like having your blogging system go MIA for a while to give your community an overwhelming impression that no one is home. Thankfully; despite the radio silence between updates there’s quite a lot to talk about!

The updates include mentions of several new PEPr proposals for packages related to Mercurial support, Twitter and holiday date validation. There's also a mention of the large amount of PEAR channels that are popping up and the future of PEAR in PHP 5.3+ with Pyrus.

New on Developer.com today there's a tutorial looking at creating complex, secure forms with the HTML_QuicForm2 PEAR package. This package will give you more control over the form, the validation it performs and the overall security it automatically handles.

For PHP developers, HTML_QuickForm2 PEAR package provides a programmatic interface for rigorously defining form controls, value requirements, and user notifications. Using HTML_QuickForm2 helps these developers create usable and secure Web forms without sacrificing visual appeal. This solution takes much of the guesswork out of secure forms development, allowing you to create robust forms with minimal time investment. In this article, I show you how to take advantage of HTML_QuickForm2 to streamline the creation and validation of complex HTML forms.

They help you get the package installed (if all goes well, it's just a call with the "pear" command-line tool) and how to create a simple form for accepting a user's name and email address. They modify it a bit to create another example - one that takes in a preferred format for the email that would be sent over to the user. They also work in the concept of required fields and how to show the error messages that might result from those being empty.