Thanks to Mario the Seagull project page is now available in Spanish.

gracias hombre

OSDir.com, run by the O’Reilly network, has put together the 2003 Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source.  There is an award for best application by language:

• Java: Eclipse
• Perl: Movable Type
• Python: Bit Torrent
• PHP: PHP, looks like they couldn’t decide here
• XML: Jabber

Then they award best software by application, and finally ‘best new apps’.

We are glad to announce the DotGeek PHP Certified Programmer certification programme.

The certification, offered totally free, is based upon the submission of sample code or tutorials on the site and not on a traditional examination. A qualified certification board will analyze all postings.

More Information at: http://www.dotgeek.org/about.php?type=certify

This is an interim release for the project, there have been many new features that have come onboard so we’re anxious to get the code out there and work with developer feedback.

Improvements of note are:

• A navigation manager has been built (Andy Crain) that uses DB_NestedSet and
  • allows unlimited levels of nav to be created
  • is GUI-driven
  • allows for nodes to be re-ordered at and moved to any level
  • has various ouput drivers provided including Coolmenu Dhtml dropdowns
  • has an additional interface for customising the look and feel of the menus
• A theme approach that allows users to swap in custom skins
• Stylesheet handling has been modularised and caching added so with a few quick changes to $primary, $secondar, etc. colour vars, you can quick change the look of the whole site (John Dell)
• The Flexy template system is quite stable now easier than ever to use
• An XHTML theme for the validator watchdogs (John Dell)
• Performance improved by removing Quickform, form-handling simplified
• Benchmarks reported 64 reqs/s on a 1.4 Ghz AMD with 512 RAM
• Password Management overhauled and security improved
• Polish and German translations started (Radek Maciaszek and Dustin Rottmann)
• A basic troubleshooting section has been added to the project site
• all project diagrams updated and a new controller workflow diagram added

The mailing list has grown, traffic doubled in December and posts are now searchable at MARC.  With greater input more bugs were fixed and project’s pace has generally picked up.  Please also note the known issues in the changelog, we’re working on these

Visit the Seagull Framework project here.

Thanks to Dan’s excellent web crawler simulation tool that gives you a search engine view of your site, I’ve shuffled around PHPkitchen’s content in an attempt to put the more relevant stuff at the top.

Please also checkout the new Thinking Outside of the Box block in the left column, this is a collection of links to some of the more interesting applications of PHP that have surfaced recently.

Dan’s other tool, the code to text analyser, reveals PHPkitchen suffers from a high html bloat, this is being addressed in latest version of Seagull project where John Dell is almost finished his XHTML theme.

Thanks to Perry Lewis who sent in this guide to getting up and running with PHP5, MySQL, Apache2 on WinXP:

Here’s what had to be done to getting it working on Windows XP:

Server Configuration:
Windows XP
Apache 2.0.48
PHP 5.0 Beta 3 (running SAPI DLL php4apache2.dll – PHP.ORG states they will rename the file to php5apache2.dll once PHP 5 is released for production)
MySQL 4.0.16

Steps to Setup:

1. After the initial installation and configuration of PHP 5, copy ALL DLL’s in PHP ‘dlls’ directory/folder to Win/Systems32 (especially libmySQL.dll).
2. Verify that the size of the file (libmySQL.dll) in System32 is the same as in ‘dlls’ directory/folder (this was what was causing my problems – for some reason the libmySQL.dll did not move to the System32 directory gracefully – it was ‘oversized’ for PHP 4 and ‘undersized’ for PHP 5 – which prompted me to delete the file and move it again – second time was a charm).
3. Ensure that php_mysql.dll is in the directory/folder that contains your extensions
4. Edit the php.ini file such that the php_mysql.dll IS NOT commented out in the EXTENSIONS section.

That should get it working; however, if you use as PHP.ORG now calls them ‘old style input arrays’ (e.g. – HTTP_GET VARS or its’ cousins) you need to edit the PHP.INI.  In exact, find register_long_arrays and change the default value of OFF to ON.

Check out ALICE, the chat bot programmed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.  Apparently like many others, I found myself impressed by the level of wit and candour of my non-human interlocutor.  Makes the likes of C3P0 and HAL seem hardly far-fetched – time to catch up on my science fiction.

Try it for yourself, chat with ALICE, browse through the project’s extensive documentation or read some related articles.