On the Ibuildings techPortal blog today there's a new article (a case study of sorts) on how to survive a plane crash. More specifically, a look at how the NU.nl news website handled the load as a result of the crash of a Turkish Airliner.

On February 25th, 2009, less than 90 days after the new infrastructure was rolled out, it was stress tested when a Turkish Airliner crashed at Schiphol. On that day the new site set a single day traffic record by serving up 21 million page views in a 24 hour time period, all without any noticeable slowdown and without having to bring additional hardware online to handle the additional load.

Their framework of choice, CodeIgniter, allowed then to create snippets of content - cached versions - that could be pulled and displayed without having to render them every single time. They looked into the Varnish project and a ATK-based CMS to piece it all back together.

If you're constantly hungering for more PHP news, there's a new resource (a Digg-like one, too) that wants to give PHPers the latest from the community and give them a way to show which they like the best - abcphp.

abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The site lets you vote (with a registered account) on the PHP-related articles they've posted ala Digg.com and breaks them up into categories like "New Releases", "PHP Dev Tools", "Database" and "Security". You can even create groups of people that share the same interests. Check it out and maybe submit a story while you're there.

The NETTUTS site has a tutorial posted today that's part one of a series looking at the Gamepress theme for WordPress and how to customize it to your needs.

GamePress is a "Gaming News & Reviews" theme for WordPress and currently one of the most popular themes at ThemeForest. It is the most advanced theme I've created so far, and really pushes what the WordPress engine can do!

This first of two parts introduces you to the template and the various components/content blocks it contains like the Features Slider, Latest Headlines, Older News and the Reviews page. You can check out a live demo of it in action to see what you think.

php|architect has posted the latest episode of their P3 podcast to the C7Y community website today - "Slow News Month".

Paul, Beth and Sean struggle to find relevant news. Summer is slow, but fortunately, our PHP-friends Derick Rethans and Ed Finkler helped us out. Big thanks to them for saving the day.

You can grab this latest episode off of their feed or just download it directly from the site.

Hasin Hayder has posted part two of his series on making a FriendFeed clone in PHP (here's part one).

Following the first installment in this series, here is the second part. In this part I will focus mainly on Bookmarking and News services supported by FriendFeed .

He points out some of the major bookmarking sites and the URLs for their interfaces for their users (like del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon and news services like digg and reddit).

Ivo Jansch has posted some great news to the Ibuildings blog today - things about the upcoming Dutch PHP conference.

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th).

The first bits of great news surround the attendance - the conference day alone is over 95% full and the tutorial day is even more packed with only a few seats left. A pre-conference part has also been set up (see the post for the details of when and where). They've even set up a page of travel information to help you if you're looking for a way to get to the Amsterdam RAI for the two-day event.

Several new tutorials, components, news and helpers have been posted to The Bakery, the CakePHP community site lately. Here's a sampling:

• CakePHP on IIS6 with FastCGI, SQL Server 2005, and ISAPI_Rewrite
• Filter Out Unnecessary Recursive Relationships
• Twitter Component
• Chartable Behavior
• Increment Behavior
• markItUp! jQuery universal markup editor Helper
• The CakePHP Blog Tutorial with SMARTY
• Vendor Branching
• CakePHP 1.2 stable coming soon

Check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related goodness.

In this new post on his blog, John Maver gives a step-by-step guide for creating a PHP5 application for the popular social networking site Bebo.com.

I have been answering a lot of email requests for how to get started with a Bebo application. Since applications can be written in any language that supports interaction with the Bebo REST API, developers have a lot of choices in how they build their application. The focus of this article will be on the "officially supported language" - PHP.

He defines the parts of the application first (the callback, canvas page, profile box, invitation and news stories). Much like the Facebook API, the Bebo system has you host the application on your own servers and use their developer libraries to interface with their systems. He makes a simple application that has a "story" published to it that shows to each visitor.

He also tosses in a method for knowing a bit more about the user - like if they've just added the application, if they're a normal user or if they've just removed it from their application list.

Doug Hill has decided to start a series on his blog that details some of the happenings in the PHP community for the past week, of which this is the first:

I spend way too much time reading blogs, surfing PHP and web development articles online. I resolve to cut back but things just sneak back into my reader somehow, and believe me dzone doesn't help. But I've came up with a way to justify all that time, I call it research.

He mentions things like the infamous CIO article, Zend's Jolt Award, comparing the Zend Framework versus PEAR and PHP releases, books and various other language-related tidbits.

Check out the post for more and keep an eye on Doug's blog for future weekly summaries.

The folks over at php|architect have consolidated their community efforts (news, the podcast and their forums) all under one new website - the C7Y PHP Community Website.

Welcome to the new community site. We've still got a bit of finishing work to do, but I think everyone would agree that this is much better than the old site! Let us know what you think.

Rather than having their community efforts spread out over their current site, they decided on on centralized resource where people can get the latest news, check out the latest podcast and interact with fellow PHPers out there on the web.

Be sure to check it out for yourself and let them know what you think.