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Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:

Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.

His series of articles covers:

• Frameworks
• Wikis
• Content Management Systems
• Debugging
• Blogware
• High Performance PHP

For those that have been keeping up with the namespace debate in the PHP community lately (the issue was the operator that would be used), it seems that a decision has been made - the backslash ( ) is the character of choice.

From Lukas Smith's blog:

So today we had an IRC meeting to discuss namespaces in PHP. We came to a final decision replacing the current double colon separator with a backslash to solve ambiguity issues with the current syntax. So far there has not been much of a reaction on list, except for a post which mentioned concerns related to the fact that backslash is currently used for escaping, but which was quickly responded by Greg to point out that yes we were aware of this, but it is not an issue if you know how to use the backslash properly in double quote strings.

You can find out more about this implementation using the backslash on this entry in the PHP.net wiki (near the bottom of the page).

Andi Gutmans has posted a reminder about the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo happening Spetember 15th through 18th in Santa Clara, CA.

I can't believe it's already ZendCon time again! I've been meeting with the planning committee and I'm really excited about this year's conference. All the usual things are back to make it great: we have a great lineup of speakers, the Meet the Teams session, and special guests like noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of ajaxian.com, and Alex Russell from Dojo.

He mentions things like the unconference (with even more great speakers, just in a more "unofficial" setting) and about the conference wiki with more details on who will be there and what they'll be attending.

There's still seats open for this year's conference, so reserve your spot today - check out the registration page on the ZendCon site for more information.

In a new post to his blog David Parra talks about compiling extension on Windows (specifically his ktaglib one).

This is actually the reason to not even try to compile my ktaglib extensions under Windows. Well but this approach is doomed to fail as most of the developers out there use Windows as their operating system. [...] So actually I ended up booting up windows again (well after searching for the harddisk that contains a running windows) and try to compile it. Otherwise my fellow collegues wouldn't be able to fix my buggy PHP code.

He talks about the pecl2 updates and how it makes compiling on a Windows system easier than before and two resources that budding Windows extension developers can use to get started - the PHP.net wiki and a screencast from Elizabeth Smith that can help out quite a bit.

Chuck Burgess has a quick post pointing out the next "PEAR triage days":

PEAR's next Bug Triage days are this weekend: Saturday 4 PM - 9 PM UTC and Sunday 4 PM - 10 PM UTC.

You can find the schedule and more information about joining in at this page on the PEAR wiki. You can find others working on the triage on the EFNet's IRC network in the #pear-bugs channel.

A new entry has been posted to the PEAR blog with the latest minutes for the group's July 13th meeting.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

Today on the SitePoint PHP blog Troels Knak-Nielsen reminds the community about a "one-stop resource" that they can use to keep up to date on some of the latest happenings with the PHP language, the PHP.net wiki.

Since March, there has been a wiki at wiki.php.net. The most interesting section is probably wiki.php.net/rfc, which - as the name implies - contains RFC's for improvements of the language. I've rambled on about closures and lambdas before, but as you can see, there is now an accepted patch. Whether it'll make it into 5.3 is unlikely at this point, but it looks like it'll at least be coming with 5.4 and/or 6.0.

He also points out the php-internals mailing list and the summaries that Steph Fox has written up weekly about the list's latest conversations.

Lukas Smith has posted a quick emPHPower update to his blog today concerning recent thoughts and progress he's made on the initiative.

I hope this all will lead to a few people to step up and really start getting involved deeply in emPHPower. Aside from this Sebastian has handed in a BOF session on emPHPower for OSCON. I hope this one will work out.

A spot has also been set aside at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo's unconference for someone to speak on the subject and to get a feel for things from the business perspective. Lukas has also been working up more details about the effort and has set up a mailing list to help with collaboration.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!