The nominations are all in, so it's time to place your votes for your favorite open source project at sourceforge.net. Voting for Sourceforge's Community Choice Awards will be open until March 23. You can vote in 14 different categories. Some of the more noteworthy contenders include phpMyAdmin, PHPEclipse, XOOPS, ZenCart, SugarCRM, AWStats, WinSCP, and FileZilla. One person per category per vote, so go speak your mind today at http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/

This is mainly a maintenance release which fixes a few security bugs. You can download your copy at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php

In a recent blog post, Dmytro Shteflyuk gives us a pointer on integrating the Smarty Templating system with the new Zend Framework. It's not as easy as you would think, so we appreciate the advice from Dmytro! To read his post, go to http://kpumuk.info/php/zend-framework-using-smarty-as-template-engine/.

The guys at Sourceforge.net have made it even easier for us to find projects we need. They've redesigned the navigation system through their software map, effectively allowing us to see more information about the projects, filter based on certain variables and save those filters for later use. For the full announcement go to http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=551378, or to go straight to the map, visit https://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/.

The IBM Developer Site has published a list of must-read sites and resources if you are a beginner to PHP. Among the list are articles, blogs, books, presentations, magazines, webcasts and mailing lists. If you're a bit overwhelmed by the amount of PHP "stuff" out there, this might be a good place to start. To see the entire list, go to http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-read/.

On Sitepoint, Harry Fuecks lets us know about 2 more frameworks to add to your list of potentials- Tonic and CodeIgniter. Both come recommended by Harry if you still haven't found one to suit your needs. Tonic can be found at http://tonic.sourceforge.net/ and CodeIgniter can be found at http://www.codeigniter.com/. For Harry's full blog entry, go to http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/03/18/more-php-frameworks.

According to a press release from Zend, you can "get a chance to win a free 1-year subscription to SafeGuard 4 by trying Beta 3 with your PHP application. Use Beta 3 to encode, obfuscate and then deploy your application (ideally on different environments and locales). The top 10 feedbacks received by March 24th will win a free 1-year subscription to SafeGuard 4. The new release is available as a free download from the Zend web site http://www.zend.com/zend_safeguard/." In case you aren't familiar with Zend's SafeGuard, it basically protects your commercially developed code by obfuscating it, on 3 different levels.

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include what's new at PEAR and PECL. Recent PEAR releases include:

• System_Command - a commandline execution interface.
• Math_Polynomial - Package to represent and manipulate Polynomial equations
• HTML_QuickForm_Livesearch - Element for HTML_QuickForm to enable a suggest search.
• System_Folders - Location of system folders
• Net_DNSBL - DNSBL Checker
• Validate_IN - Validation class for the Republic of India
• Image_3D - This class allows the rendering of 3 dimensional objects utilizing PHP.
• Net_Geo - Geographical locations based on Internet address

And for PECL, we had:

• gnupg - wrapper around the gpgme library
• json - JavaScript Object Notation
• oci8 - OCI8 functions
• pecl_http - Extended HTTP Support
• zip - A zip management extension

As always, you can download or learn more about these packages at http://pear.php.net and http://pecl.php.net.

See you next week with more tidbits from the PHP world!