In a quick news tip on Hardened-PHP (http://www.hardened-php.net), they have released security patches for the latest versions of PHP4 and PHP5 (PHP4.4.2 and PHP5.1.4). These security patches fix security holes not yet addressed by php.net, so it may behoove you to take a look. Both patches can be found in the download area of the Hardened-PHP site: http://www.hardened-php.net/downloads.13.html

Dotgeek has announced it is giving away 50 free PHP5 hosting accounts through its PHP HostingBingo. Simply sign up and you are assigned a unique ticket number. Every month 50 numbers are drawn for a free hosting account. For more details, go to http://www.dotgeek.org/bingo/hostbingo.php.

Do you know enough about a PHP-related topic to talk about it for 5 minutes? Then you might qualify as a "lightning talk" speaker at OSCON. The session will be hosted by George Schlossnagle, and per the site, "Lightning talks are a collection of 5-minute talks given by you, members of the PHP community. A mainstay of the Perl side of the convention, lightning talks are an exciting format and an excellent place to showcase new ideas, ask questions, or rant. Lightning talks are a great place for both novice and experienced speakers; a place where you can hone your speaking skills and condense subjects to their most essential bits. They're a great place to ask questions, talk about lessons you've learned, showcase new techniques or introduce new projects." So if you have an idea, why not send it in? Go to http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9157 and send them your ideas. (Chris Shiflett has also posted some helpful lightning talks links on his blog).

In a quick note on Zeev Suraski's blog, we see that Guy Harpaz (Product Manager of the PHP Developers Tools at Zend and the PHP IDE Project Leader at Eclipse.org ) has started a new blog, mostly related to those projects. So if you're using those projects and you have room on your blogroll for one more participant, you can visit Guy's new blog at http://guyharpaz.blogspot.com/ .

An announcement on the php|architect site lets us know that there is now Zend Studio training available through the php|a team. The six hour (2 day) course is all done online so you don't have to leave the comfort of your desk chair. For a limited time, you can purchase the class for $50CAD so if you're a Zend Studio user, check this puppy out. For more info, go to http://hades.phparch.com/hermes/public/viewnews/index.php?id=3127.

Nexen.net has posted their adoption statistics for April 2006. From the site: "PHP 4.4 is growing, taking users from PHP 4.3. However, the adoption phase seems to vanish : the progression speed is declining, while still positive. PHP 5 is drawing users from every other PHP version." PHP4 is still the big winner, however, at still a 92% adoption rate. If you'd like to see the numbers, you can go to Nexen's site at http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/php_stats_evolution_for_april_2006.php.

Both releases deal with bug fixes and relatively minor issues (release notes) and they can both be downloaded from the phpMyAdmin site: http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php.

This popped up in a few places this week-- the news of an interactive shell for PHP released by Jan Kneschke, and available here: http://jan.kneschke.de/projects/php-shell/. If you're in need of CLI, check this out. The features include tab-completion (if readline() support is compiled into php), handles FATAL errors (like calling a undefined function), inline help, works on all php platforms, and it requires PHP 5 or later.

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

• Net_Dict 1.0.5 - Interface to the DICT Protocol
• PEAR_Frontend_Gtk2 0.1.2 - Graphical PEAR installer based on PHP-Gtk2
• PEAR_PackageUpdate_Web 0.2.0 - A Web front end for PEAR_PackageUpdate
• Gtk2_VarDump 0.1.0 - A simple GUI to examine php data trees
• Image_GraphViz 1.2.0 - Interface to AT&T's GraphViz tools
• PHPUnit2 3.0.0alpha3 - Regression testing framework for unit tests.
• Gtk2_IndexedComboBox 0.2.0 - Indexed Gtk2 combo box similar to the HTML select box.
• PEAR_PackageFileManager_Frontend 0.3.0 - PEAR_PackageFileManager_Frontend, the singleton-based frontend for user input/output.
• PEAR_PackageFileManager_Frontend_Web 0.2.0 - A Web GUI frontend for the PEAR_PackageFileManager2 class
• Cache_Lite 1.7.1- Fast and Safe little cache system

And for PECL, we had:

• pdo_user - Userspace driver for PDO

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!