On the PHPClasses blog today the question is posed "can .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation?" (relating to the use of the Phalanger tool to compile PHP down to .NET assemblies.

Recently Phalanger 3.0 was released introducing numerous improvements in terms of compatibility with the PHP 5.3, interoperability with .NET platform implementations including Mono on Linux, and probably most importantly performance improvements. [...] What motivated this article was that a PHP developer named Rasmus Schultz went on the php.internals mailing list and proposed to switch the official PHP implementation based on Zend for another based on Phalanger.

The post includes some benchmarking results of requests made to a WordPress instance running on various PHP platforms. The Phalanger version came in around 2 seconds faster (average, obviously) than the PHP FastCGI setup. Also included are two suggestions for future PHP versions (v6 anyone?) that could help the language perform even better: Thread-safety for running with less memory waste and the inclusion of a JIT (Just in time compiler - of which a few are mentioned specifically.

According to this new post on CodeIgniter.com, EllisLab is announcing an official fork of the current CodeIgniter framework that will be driven by a group of six community members.

Yes, you read that right, EllisLab will be creating a CodeIgniter fork. For you. By you. We need six talented, opinionated, critical coders from the community who have a heavy personal and/or professional interest in CodeIgniter's ongoing development to act as deputies for the repository. [...] You can also nominate someone else for one of the six seats by emailing the above information on their behalf.

EllisLab will be going over the applications for the next few weeks and may ask the community to help them narrow things down. An NDA will have to be signed by the selected group and a rollout of this new fork is planned for sometime in Q1 of 2011.

The Debuggable Blog has posted the announcement about the release of the final schedule for this year's CakeFest being released:

our beloved "CakeFest" - is announced! For those of you who don't know about the event yet, here is a little wrapup. The next and third CakeFest will be held in Berlin, hometown of Debuggable! From July 9-12, people from all over Europe and the rest of the world will travel to Germany in order to celebrate and learn about the best PHP framework there is.

The conference will run from July 9th through the 12th with two days of workshops and two days of the actual conference. You can find out more details on the whens and wheres from the official conference website.

Following up on the previous announcement about the date for the PHP North West conference, Lorna Mitchell has posted some more specific information to her blog:

Last night at the PHPNW user group we announced this year's conference - PHPNW09. We don't have a lot of detail but here is a run-down of all the information I have.

The conference will be held at the Manchester Conference Center this year (changed from last year) with the (currently) estimated pricing for Early Bird tickets coming in at 50 GBP (+VAT) until September 10th.

Keep an eye on the conference's main website for more information as it becomes available.

The MTA group has officially released the main website for this year's CodeWorks traveling PHP "roadshow".

Welcome! CodeWorks 2009 is a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine. CodeWorks will travel to seven locations across the United States between September 22nd and October 5th included. Each two-day event includes a day of in-depth tutorials and a day of conference talks arranged across three different tracks, all presented by the best experts in the business.

Each of the stops along the conference route (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, New York) will be limited to 300 attendees in each location and pricing will start at $99 for the Early Bird tickets. You can find out more information about signing up on this page of the CodeWorks site.

Ralph Schinder has posted about a new development in the world of Zend Framwork distribution - a PEAR channel.

For the past few months, the ZF team has been playing with the idea of releasing ZF from a PEAR channel. Over the past 2 years, we have seen a few channels distributing ZF that have pop up here and there.. so that lead us to believe there is an itch that needs scratching. The compelling reason against a PEAR channel is that, with ZF, there is nothing to "install". Just pop ZF in your include_path and off you go.

With the introduction of the next release (1.8) and the Zend_Tool component that comes with it, the framework is graduating from a "component library" into a more holistic framework with a more advanced distribution system. For those interested, he also includes the details of the channel (from pear.zfcampus.org) and the organizational plan of how the channel is laid out.

Ben Ramsey has a new blog post that mentions a move for the PHP User Group mailing list - putting it official on the php.net services.

You may recall PHP Groups being created over a year ago for the purpose of networking together the leaders and organizers of PHP user groups around the world. I've been very bad about keeping things moving on this front, but I want to pick things back up and get us talking again.

If you'd like to subscribe to the list, send an email to ug-admins-subscribe [at] lists.php.net. If you don't want to subscribe but still want to keep track of what's happening, point your news reader to news://news.php.net/ug.admins.

In an effort to keep things a bit more secure (after finding out about this) the symfony team has officially released their own security policy to help prevent issues like that in the future.

You may be wondering why it has been taking us such a long time to react. Here's the main reason: we had not a very strong security alert reporting and qualifying process. This has been fixed recently. So as of now, if you find a security bug in symfony, please send an email to security at symfony-project.com, with as much details as you can and ideally a patch if you can provide one.

The wiki has a whole section on how to report security issues to get them to the right place.

As per this announcement on the Zend Developer Zone website, the Zend Framework group has released the latest version of their application framework - Zend Framework 1.5.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, today announced the availability of version 1.5 of Zend Framework, the popular open source PHP framework [...] Additional features in Zend Framework 1.5 include support for several new services and enhancements to already popular features that make building modern web sites easier and faster than ever.

Updates include changes to Zend_Form, Zend_Layout, the LDAP authentication component, an update to the Lucene support, more Ajax functionality and much more. There's also a new service Zend has launched to provide more "official support" for developers/companies using the framework. You can find out more information about the service here.

Richard Thomas has officially released his first version of his jQPie software he's been developing.

Svn code had some issues in IE, this has been cleared up. New dynamic table sorter added and overall code cleaned up. Table sorter was redone from the ground up and is now a complete rewrite from my original demo code I used as the base.

He's looking for other developers out there that are interested in making the port of the PHP part to other languages (the "slices of pie" to make it portable). If you're interested, go grab the latest version from his SVN repository.