Christian Wenz has pointed out one of the latest releases from Zend - the latest updates for their Zend Studio for Eclipse product (and Zend Studio too).

I am probably not the first to notice that, but thought it would be worth mentioning anyway. Zend have released version 6.0 of Zend Studio for Eclipse. Actually, this version 6.0 is the first final version of the Eclipse edition of Zend Studio.

He walks through this new version, commenting on everything from the interface to the version of PHP it cmes with out to an issue he had with updating (and how it was corrected).

Just a quick note to all of you Twitter-ers out there - we've added our own account you can follow if you'd like to get the latest PHPDeveloper.org news straight to your client (or cellphone):

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow phpdeveloper to get the latest updates. It uses the Twitter Feed website to pull our feed in and push it out, so you'll get the latest updates as they come out.

Ben Ramsey has put together a dashboard widget to grab the latest from the Funcaday.com website (spotlights one PHP function each day).

While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.

TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.

Edin Kadribasic has posted another new build of the PHP 4.x series and the latest MySQL libraries - PHP 4.4.6-win32 with MySQL 5.0.37.

I have compiled 5.0.36 libs mysqlf since that release didn't include pre-built windows binaries. I thought it would be the best if we bundled "original" MySQL DLLs so here is the PHP 4.4.6 binary compiled against 5.0.37 MySQL libraries. Upcoming versions of PHP5 are going to include this version of MySQL client library as well.

Click here to download this latest version (two files, both to be dropped into your existing install directory.

Hannes Magnusson has posted about more updates that are being made to the PHP.net website today, including an upgrade to the "conference teaser" patch and the introduction of a new box to like directly to the latest releases on the front page.

Since I moved the 'current releases' info into "a giant" includable array, living in include/version.inc, we can now provide a simple XML feed (or whatever) for you to parse to get the latest release info simpler and more accurately...

What do you think? Is it worth it? What kind of format would you want it in?

He wants your feedback on this last point - would having an XML feed for just the version info be that useful? Or would it just be yet another RSS feed to add to the list to keep up with the new PHP releases?

If you're a Serendipity user, you need to install the pactch that Dan Scott mentions in his latest blog post:

I thought you should know they just released a security update to fix an XSS issue in the administration backend. Unfortunately, s9y.org itself appears to be very ill at the moment: I kept getting 500 - Internal Server Error.

There's an update that's been released and (will be) available from their site, but you can also just upgrade to the latest version as downloaded from their sourceforge repository.

For more information, check out the Hardened-PHP Group's security advisory on the issue.

Ilia Alshanetsky has a very quick note today about the inclusion of libSQlite version 3.3.7 in the upcoming PHP 5.2 release.

I've just completed the upgraded of the bundled libsqlite in pdo driver from a fairly antiquated 3.2.8 to the latest 3.3.7.

Yet, another reason to upgrade to 5.2.0 when it comes out.

For more information on using PDO and the status of it, check out the PHP manual page for it, specifically this page for more on the SQLite drivers.

Wez Furlong has posted some information today on his blog hot on the heels of the PHP 5.1.3 release about the inclusion of the latest PDO/PDO drivers in the release.

PHP 5.1.3 was just released, including the latest PDO and PDO drivers. If you're still running older releases of PHP you should probably upgrade. If you don't want to upgrade the PHP core then you'll be pleased to know that I've also released the PHP 5.1.3 versions of PDO, PDO::MYSQL, PDO::PGSQL, PDO::SQLITE and PDO::ODBC to PECL--these are the versions that I've had time to personally test.

These are identical to the code in PHP 5.1.3, with the exception of PDO::ODBC, which includes two additional bug fixes that didn't make it in time.

He also shares a note for those out there trying to build PDO drivers off of the older PECL drivers to work in PHP 5.1.2. Unfortunately, they were also filing bug reports when things broke - a thing that "doesn't make sense" when the bundled PDO should work just fine.

Demian Turner shares a quick note with us today about some enhancements that he's noticed over on the My Account area of the Zend website.

"... we hope to bring a great web experience". So says the new revamped My Account area of Zend. And this is what it looks like 5 mins after login, ie, the same as it looked immediately after login.

When you log into the section, all of your data is instantly populated in each of the boxes down the left-hand side. You can also edit your personal information right there on the page. Definitely a good, simple use of the technology - not horribly overbearing like other sites out there.

Greg Beaver has an advisory message posted on his blog today about why it's imporatant to upgrade PEAR from 1.3.x to the latest, 1.4.6.

PEAR 1.4.6 was just released at pear.php.net (http://pear.php.net/PEAR). This is a minor bugfix release and complete details are available at pear.php.net, but I must stress two points with extreme seriousness:

• PEAR 1.4.6 fixes make install-pear INSTALL_ROOT=/rpm/packaging and introduces the --packagingroot option to install, which works like --installroot worked in PEAR 1.3.x
• PEAR 1.3.x has several serious bugs and at least 2 serious security vulnerabilities. Using PEAR 1.3.x on a production machine is EXTREMELY dangerous

He goes on to discuss further why that second point is particularly dangerous, including several unpublished serious bugs. You can download the latest PEAR packages from the main PEAR site...