In the wake of this year's php|tek conference, Marco Tabini has unveiled his secrets to the "master conference evil plan" that he and the php|architect crew have been putting in to action for their conferences:

For the past four years, I have put a lot of work into executing a strategic plan that is tangentially connected with our conferences. [...] Instead [of trying to force interaction], I decided to try and slowly steer things in a direction that would have made our conferences closer to a family reunion than a dry business meetup.

He mentions the steps in his "evil plan" (for conference domination?) - community participation, setting the right atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, the oh-so-secret choosing of the speakers and their leadership by example through participation with the speakers and other conference goers.

Tim Koschuetzki has started up a new poll on his site asking its visitors questions involving CakePHP:

The new poll asks you if you are using the CakePHP Framework already or if you plan on using it. For those of you who don't know it yet - it's in my opinion th framework to go these days. The easy and intuitive MVC architecture and the components in it make php development really easy and fun.

So far there haven't been any votes (it's still pretty new) so get on over and voice your opinion now.

CakePHP is one of the more popular and powerful PHP frameworks out there and it has a loyal following of dedicated users and developers on its team. It's definitely worth checking out if you're still perusing the market for a framework to go with.

In a new article on the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler talks a bit about the newly released version of the PHPSecInfo package (version 0.1.2) and what some of the future plans for it are.

New release, new plans! First off, a new build of PHPSecInfo is out. Version 0.1.2, build 20061218. Per usual, get your new version from http://phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/.

New features include:

• Code is now licensed under '�New BSD'� license. See LICENSE
• fix bug in post_max_size check where upload_max_size value was being checked
• Now providing an md5 hash for releases

And some of the plans for the future include more detailed test results, a web-based "glossary" of howtos on fixing problems, and more tests for more cases.

If you'd like to contribute tests or other resources to the project, head over to its homepage and let them know.

In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".

I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.

His list consists of:

• You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan
• Combat Database Abuse
• Do You Really Need A Database Anyway?
• Scale Horizontally
• Refactor To Scale Vertically

For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.

On the Shadow Fox Network today, they've posted parts one and two of their look at building a better blogging system.

In part one, they talk about things where all good projects should start - with the planning and what it will take to get the project done. This includes the structure of the application, the usability, and the extensions you'll want to use.

Part two goes a step further into the planning stage by looking specifically at the design and usability of the application. They start with the base HTML and add some styling and images to make it easier to use.

From Dhani's blog today, there's this new tutorial (part 1) showing you how to create a guest book for your site with PHP's help.

Proper development on any kind of project requires you to stop and evaluate the project before development begins (hopefully long before, but that's not always the case).

Having said that, let's figure out what we want the guestbook to do. What's the guestbook for? In this case, it's simply to let users view other visitor's comments and to add their own. The guestbook is not a stand alone application - well it is, but it exists in the context of the web site

There's a few considerations mentioned before the code comes along (broken up into the business and technical sections). With the plan in place, Dhani shows the database layout chosen, the reasoning behind it, and the actual SQL you'll need to create it.

In this week's PHP-GTK update, Scott Mattocks updates us on the goins on in the world of PHP-GTK for the previous week. Unfortunately, there wasn't too much going on, but what was there mentioned some big steps.

The main item mentioned for the week is the release plan for PHP-GTK 2-alpha, the first official release for this enhanced library. There are still a few things they need to clean up (patches, issues with Windows, and a modification to the packaging script), but things are flowing smoothly towards this new release.

Other updates made this week include documentation updates to GtkLabel and the Glossary, a search feature added to the manual, an update made to the Wikipedia page for the project, and two PEAR project updates.

On his blog today, Pierre has an interesting post that has details on some of the Oracle acquisition plans - some of which might include Zend.

There is rumours relayed by The Register about Oracle acquisitions plan, it is a quite surprising to see Zend in the list. Note that the text is not clear, but whether it is true or not, the scenario is interesting enough to think about the impacts in the PHP world.

He also comments on the "creator of PHP" tagline that Zend uses quite a bit, and how, if it were moved over to Oracle, would be "an insult".