Derick Rethans (master of all things date and time in PHP) has a new post to his blog showing how to correctly get the "next month" since the date string parser doesn't understand how to use that string directly.

Over and over again PHP users complain that next month in PHP's date-string parser doesn't go to the next month, but instead skips to the one after next month.

He describes what happens internally, how PHP bumps up the month and counts the number of days, and how you can use some of newer features in the PHP 5.3 release to get the first day of the next month. Specifically, this means using the "first day of next month" string for the modify() call on the DateTime object. If you're not on PHP 5.3 yet, Derick also includes a method in the comments to do it a slightly different way.

In a new blog post, Chris Hartjes asks what's the next stack coming up on the horizon. LAMP has been the king for so long now it's hard to think about what might be next, but he takes a stab at it:

So the next thing I've been wondering about is about what future PHP stacks will look like, at least on the open source side of things. Have we gotten to the point where this is as good as it gets?

He looks at other stacks he's been working with (like LNNP - Linux, nginx, Postgres and PHP) as well as the question of limitations. Are we limiting ourselves by relying on LAMP too much? What else is out there? Does Javascript have a permenant place in any of this? (jLAMP anyone?)

Greg Beaver, the ever-vigilant promoter and coder of the PEAR project has announced the latest version of the PEAR project has been released - version 1.4.9.

The latest stable release of the PEAR installer, version 1.4.9, has been released at pear.php.net. This release addresses a critical bug introduced in the release of PEAR 1.4.8 earlier this month. This version has been rigorously tested to ensure no future breakage (the last release had inordinate time pressure due to external circumstances). You can read about it and retrieve it at http://pear.php.net/PEAR.

Also mentioned in the post is their embarking on the next leap in PEAR's evolution - version 1.5.0. It won't be a major leap up (like from 1.3.x to 1.4.x), but many changes will be made - including extensive work on how PECL extensions are installed and implemented.