Padraic Brady has posted about two of his proposals for the Zend Framework - Zend_Feed_Writer and Zend_PubSubHubbub he's submitted to the framework's proposal queue.

ZFW is the counterpart to Zend_Feed_Reader (as if that wasn't obvious). It's purpose is to, once again, offer an alternative to the current Zend_Feed component using similar principles to those applied in Zend_Feed_Reader. [...] Which brings us to upcoming proposal number two, the colourfully named Zend_PubSubHubbub! Or Zend_Feed_PubSubHubbub depending on which name is most appropriate. To explain, PubSubHubbub defines a protocol where any subscriber (that's you) can subscribe to a hub server which notifies you when any feed you want to follow has changed.

He gets into a bit more detail and explains some features for each component and how they'd integrate with a few of the other modules in the framework. You can find the proposal for the Zend_Feed_Writer here and the Zend_PubSubHubbub proposal here.

As is mentioned on the PEAR blog today, there's some new advancements that are being made to make submitting proposals simpler.

Thanks to the efforts of Daniel O'Connor, the PEAR website is getting nicer and better. Bug RSS feeds support Baetle now, the PEAR proposal system - PEPr - works again and many small improvements and fixes found their way on the site.

Baetle is a "bug and enhancement tracking language" project that describes the information in things like the BugZilla and Jira tracking applications.

The PHP.net site has made an announcement about the project's involvement with this year's Google Summer of Code:

nce again we are happy to announce our involvement with the Google Summer of Code project. Be sure to check our program at this years GSoC. We invite everyone to look at the list of ideas for this years GSoC, and get involved. Students are welcome to propose their own ideas, and we will consider all applications that are received before the April 3rd deadline.

The list for this summer includes projects like an Automatic Code Checker, creation of some Benchmarks (for the language), improvements to PHP-GTK and the creation of an online editor for the PHP.net manual documentation. If you have a proposal to add to the wiki, please submit it by April 3rd, 2009 to be considered.

As a reminder, today is the last day to get in talk proposals for next year's php|tek conference:

Today is the last day of the Call for Papers for our upcoming php|tek 2009 conference, which will take place in Chicago between May 19 and 22nd. Don't forget to send in your proposals before it's too late!

You can get more information about submitting a talk from this page on the conference website as well as where to send the proposals and what kind of speaker compensation package they have to offer.

Brian DeShong has posted an update for his Zend_Log_Writer_Mail component of the Zend Framework - its now "Ready for Recommendation".

Almost a year ago, I proposed a really simple Zend Framework module, Zend_Log_Writer_Mail. [...] I've received a great deal of feedback, and have only recently committed myself to really pouring over that feedback to polish up the proposal. Thanks to everyone that commented! So, as of tonight, I polished the code up, made what I felt to be the most worthwhile changes, and marked it as "Ready for Recommendation."

You can find out more about the component and leave your own thoughts via the proposal page on the Zend Framework site.

Max Horvath has called for some help in getting a feature included (and fully working) into the next release of the Eclipse PDT extension - phar support.

With Eclipse PDT 2.0 to be released in September (or October) support for namespaces is already on the roadmap. Support for Phar archives has not been listed, yet. But in my opinion Eclipse PDT 2.0 must support handling Phar archives when PHP 5.3 will hit the street.

He points out some of the current lackings that the Eclipse extension has including the inability to browse phar archives and that there is no way to debug the archives. He's opened a feature request for the functonality to be added and suggested fleshing it out on the wiki.

This is where you come in - he wants to know what sort of support that developers out there would like for phar in this next release. Just leave comments on his blog with your ideas.

The PHP::Impact blog has pointed out that the Zend Framework has gotten even closer to having a true method for dependency injection in its applications - a proposal issued for Zend_Container.

Bradley Holt has announced the creation of a new proposal Zend_Container, a simplified version of Zend_Di. According to him, if the framework is going to have a dependency injection component this component needs to be as simple as possible, something along the lines of PicoContainer.

The proposal seeks to replace the use of class-managed singletons and Zend_Registry, scope access to containers and use reflection to determine dependencies for items inside. The component has been given the go-ahead from the ZF team and development is already in process.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial (from Aldemar Bernal) about some of the basic use of the Zend_Acl component of the Zend Framework.

So, what is wrong with Zend_Acl and the current MVC implementation in the Zend Framework? there is nothing wrong, it is just that it gets not too obvious for developers how to achieve an optimal integration between these two important parts of the framework.

He talks about the proposal that's out for a potential update to the component, the two key points being the front controller plugin and a new action helper. He includes some sample code showing how to set it all up including a "denied" controller to handle the failures.

David Coallier is looking for a few good men (women, children, pets who can code, etc) to join up with the PHP development group for this year's Google Summer of Code to help with the various ideas they've come up with.

Hello everyone, as mentioned a few weeks ago the most awaited Google Summer of Code is back again this year. This being said, once again the PHP Project has been accepted and we have started posting our list of ideas (http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008).

Some of the projects proposed include:

• PECL, website improvements and Windows Build Support
• Automatic Code Checker
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6
• Build Infrastructure and macro bindings for writing extension in D
• Rewrite the run-tests.php script
• PhD: The PHP based Docbook renderer

Be sure to check out the full list and see where you might want to get involved!

Piggybacking on a recent proposal for traits in PHP, Lukas Smith has suggested something that could help make the organization of these sorts of contributions (and their "staying power") a bit more likely to happen - an official PHP.net wiki of sorts.

As such I really like what Stefan has done with his Traits proposal. Very nicely done. [...] Right now the RFC documents are hidden away in the unwieldy mailinglist archive and Stefan's private homepage, which could disappear any day. Of course there are also the various web archives, but what would be nice to have is a PHP.net wiki.

He notes that not only would this help protect information like this from dropping off the face of the web but it might also pave the way for some other changes to be made to the language (and to provide a space where everyone can share their ideas). He specifically mentions his wants for an array_merge_replace and a change to file_exists.