On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:

Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?

There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.

In this new post to till's blog, he looks at a method for setting up PEAR on a Plesk system.

Now running any config interface is a blog entry by itself and when I say Plesk, I should also mention confixx and cpanel. And while I have a strong dislike for all them, let me focus on Plesk for now. This is not a copy'n'paste howto, so make sure you double-check all steps involved. With little knowledge, you should be able to to apply all instructions to any other control panel, all you need is SSH access to the server.

The process includes two different sections - why your PEAR installation may not be working and how to install the PEAR packages (on any system supporting a package manager). Command line calls and configuration options are also included.

Jani Hartikainen has made a few updates to his packageizer script for the Zend Framework to improve its interface.

Now, based on some feedback from users, I've improved the user interface of the tool: You can now select multiple items for inclusion in the package, and I've made it possible to get the packages in .phar format. It also has initial support for different libraries, ie. Zend Framework 1.6 and Zend Framework SVN trunk, but currently only 1.6 stable is available.

The tool allows you to select just the packages out of the Zend Framework that you might want to work with and packages them up, along with their dependencies, into a simple, portable file that can be used anywhere the Framework normally could.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswani looking at the reading and writing of metadata for mp3s and images with two handy PECL extensions.

It's just that every time I sit down to have a go at [finding something in my photo or mp3 library], the sheer volume of data overwhelms me and I take the command decision to deal with something easier instead. Sounds familiar? If it does, help is at hand, in the form of PHP's ID3 and EXIF extensions. These extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it's easier to navigate and search. Keep reading, and I'll show you how.

He installs the ID3 package first (via the pecl command line tool) and gives a few sample scripts to pull the metadata information out of a mp3 file as well as update/remove the information that's already there. He even sets up a simple SQLite database to store the information he's retrieved.

The second part of the tutorial looks at grabbing the image metadata via the EXIF extension. This can yield all sorts of information including date/time the photo was taken, the resolution, the model of the camera and various camera settings at the time. He includes a sample script that automatically makes thumbnails for the images via the exif_thumbnail function.

In this new post to his blog Chris Jones looks at an option to increase the performance of your PHP/Oracle application even more - converting a REF CURSOR into a piped data set via the PDO_OCI extension.

REF CURSORs are common in Oracle's stored procedural language PL/SQL. They let you pass around a pointer to a set of query results. However in PHP, PDO_OCI doesn't yet allow fetching from them. [...] One workaround, when you can't rewrite the PL/SQL code to do a normal query, is to write a wrapper function that pipes the output.

He includes an example, creating an example myproc() that contains the query to select the last names of all employees in the table. This procedure is put inside of a package so it can be called directly in the SQL statement and the ref cursor can be automatically piped to output.

Sameer has posted a new tutorial to his blog recently, a look at a drop-in solution for pagination in your application - the PEAR Pager package.

Pagination is a frequent requirement in web development projects. Most PHP developers must have already implemented paging in one form or other in their projects. In this post we will see how to add pagination the easy way using PEAR's Pager class. Note that in all the posts I use PHP 5.x.x, so if you are still stuck at version 4.x.x, its already time to upgrade.

He includes a simple example (just the page links), how to install the Pager package and a larger example where the results are pulled from a database table and paginated correctly based on an offset ID. There's even some CSS thrown in to make it a bit more pleasing to the eye.

This new tutorial from the Zend Developer Zone (by Vikram Vaswani) looks at getting data objects set up between PHP and the DB_OO2 package.

Data objects, which provide an API for accessing and manipulating database tables, are one such tool. There are a number of implementations for data objects in PHP, most notably the popular PEAR DB_DataObject package. This tutorial focuses on one such implementation, the DB_OO2 package, showing you how it can significantly reduce your coding time when working with database tables.

The DB_OO2 package (PEAR) lets you set up references to your database tables as objects and interface with them by setting properties and calling standardized functions. Many of the PHP frameworks out there let you do this same sort of thing, but those are built in - this method lets you use the package wherever.

Jani Hartikainen has put together a handy script for those out there that like what the Zend Framework is all about but don't really need the whole thing to get the job done. If that's you, this script might be just what you need.

Did you ever want to use just a single component from Zend Framework, but couldn't figure out which files you needed? Well, here's a solution: Zend Framework packageizer script! Just pick the class you want, and you'll get it and all its dependencies in a nice zip file for you to consume.

The packager uses the tokenizer functionality PHP offers natively to look through the files for the package you're after and finds all of the files that might need to be included and pulls them right along into the zip file.

David Parra has posted his method for getting the latest version of PHP compiled under a machine running OpenSolaris.

As I switched my main system recently from Linux to OpenSolaris I compiled PHP. Quiet obvious things are a little bit different on Solaris. The usual ./buildconf && ./configure && make install doesn't work anymore. The good news: It's not much harder.

A few extra packages are required (like SUNWgmake, SUNWgcc and SUNWbison) and the Re2c library, but after that, it's just like a normal install. All commands needed to make the build are included in the post.

In a quick post to his blog, Nick Williams points out a very handy extension for PHP - Phar.

Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It's basically PHP's answer to Java's .jar archive format. Don't get excited yet, it gets better...

He mentions the reasons that make it "particularly handy" such as it being integrated into the next major PHP release (5.3) and that it makes deployment quick and easy. He includes a brief code snippet to show how a sample Phar archive could be created (via streams).