On the Symfony project blog there's a recent post from <>Fabien Potencier about the popular framework's development and source moving to a new home - github.

As you might have noticed if you follow me on Twitter (which you should do as I make a lot of small announcements there), or if you monitor the Subversion activity closely, the Symfony 2 code is now hosted on Git. [...] So, from now on, all the development activity for Symfony 2 will take place on the new Git repository.

He briefly covers what git is and a resource (book) he used to help understand this recently popular version control system. If you don't want to learn a new version control system but still want to contribute back with the subversion knowledge you're already armed with, you can still use their svn mirror to get the latest releases.

On the PseudoCoder blog today Matt Curry has posted about his migration from WordPress over to the Croogo CMS.

Why Croogo? Because it's CakePHP based and it was released when I was at my most frustrated with WordPress. I'm really that easy. I wanted something Cake based so it would be easy to tweak. Plus it uses Cake's theme, which I already know, so I was able to convert the old WordPress theme (with a few updates) in about 5 minutes.

There's a simple three step process to make the switch that, fortunately, involves a plugin called Bye_Wordpress for Croogo that makes moving the contents of your blog a lot simpler. There are a few things to watch out for including database encodings, spam protection and there's a bit of code he includes to show how to map your old URLs to their new locations.

Till Klampaeckel has posted the second part of his look at migrating your application away from the relational world of MySQL and into the document-oriented toolset CouchDB has to offer. You can find part one here.

In part I, I introduced CouchDB by explaining its basics. I continued by showing a simple request to create a document using curl (on the shell) and expanded how the same request could be written in PHP (using ext/curl) - or in HTTP_Request2 or with phpillow. Part II will focus on the most basic operations and help you build a small wrapper for CouchDB. The code will be available on Github.

He briefly covers some of the features of the database, the Futon software to interact with it and some of the basics on the usual CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. The sample code shows how to add a new document into the database, pull it back out (with a get() call) and delete the document from the database completely. The source for the example is here.

On the Ibuildings blog today Dennis-Jan Broerse has posted the first part of a series he's doing on moving a development team up into the world of object oriented programming.

Being a trainer for Ibuildings, I noticed that the main topic of almost every course plan for customers is object oriented programming. So OO is popular and demand for it is rising. However, while PHP support for OO has been present for a couple of years still many companies that I visit are maintaining and developing procedural applications.

He talks some about how he tries to promote the OOP way of doing things and defines one of the major hindrances for companies to try to move their development towards it - time. The next part of his series will look at ways to help with this.

The PHP project has been making a major change lately - an upgrade of their version control system of choice from CVS to Subversion. They started the move the other day and now, according to this new post on the PHP.net website, the process has been completed.

The migration from CVS to Subversion is complete. The web interface is at svn.php.net. You can read about it at php.net/svn.php, wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq. The URL to feed to your svn client is http://svn.php.net/repository. There is also a github mirror. Please use that instead of trying to do a full git clone from the svn repository. See the instructions at wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq#git.

The instructions contain complete information on how to get and compile this "bleeding edge" (and what libraries you might need to install to get it up and working).

On the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has posted a look at PHP 5.3 from a slightly different perspective - how development with it affects the management.

At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.

He talks about why you should consider the move up to PHP 5.3 and some of the things you should use to handle (and pay attention to) the migration.

PHP 5.3 may have officially just launched but the Ibuildings crew has been preparing for it and have already posted this guide to help you make the migration up to this latest version.

The good news is that if you've been keeping your applications current with the language and best practices, there are very few things that could affect you. The bad news is that the farther away from the current version of the language you get, the harder it is going to be to port your code. For developers coding against the 5.2 branch, there are a few edge case situations of which, you need to be aware.

The post includes a list of the major updates to the functionality of PHP 5.3 including changes to some of the array functions, deprecated functionality and the addition of two new reserved words - GOTO and NAMESPACE.

After having moved servers just recently, Manuel Lemos has a few helpful hints for anyone out there considering a web site/web server move in the near future:

Despite the benefits of migrating to a better server, the actual migration is a complicated process that can fail in so many ways that I thought it would be a good idea to share what you need to be concerned if you need to migrate your servers too. You need to go through several steps that need to be done in the right order to prevent major headaches.

Here's his ten steps/recommendations of things to keep an eye on during the move:

• Prepare your DNS
• Setup the new server
• Tune the server file system for performance and integrity
• Install the base applications
• Initial data migration
• Put the old server in migration mode
• Bring your new server to life
• Double check your server security
• Epilogue (the final miscellaneous startup/setup items)
• The forgotten step that you remembered

DevShed has finished off their series looking at sending MIME emails with PHP in this new tutorial, moving the current code from the previous parts up to a fully PHP5 state.

While this mailer class can be used with small PHP applications, it lacks some important features related specifically to its object model, since it was built in PHP 4 from the very beginning.

They review the PHP4 version of the script first then move on to the process of porting it to a more standardized PHP5 structure and code.

In a new post to the Developer Tutorials blog Akash Mehta takes a look at migrating PHP4 applications up to the more recent versions of PHP5.

PHP 5 supports most of the legacy syntax features of PHP 4. Most code written for PHP 4 should function fine under PHP 5, and a comprehensive test suite could check this. However, many of the backwards-incompatible changes in PHP 5 were in regard to language quirks, and quite a few hacks rely on these in order to function.

He points out some of these hacks including changes to the object model and updates to the way variables are handled (breaking many "bad use" cases). He also points out the changes made in the latest Windows binaries as well as some of the new reserved keywords that could conflict with pre-existing code in your application.