Quite a nice collection of scripts over at http://php.amnuts.com/ - I particularly liked the string and date/time libs, and the image manipulation stuff.

While trying to get some publicity for Seagull over at OpenSourceCms, I noticed they have some great CMS reviews posted by their readers.  I’m probably the last one to notice this – if you’re the same and interested in the subject, check them out: solid, quality reviews of many of the leading products.

At last a new Seagull release, 0.3.7 is finally ready, we’re going to go through a few betas but functionality is basically set.  New features/improvements of note:

• navigation manager now outputs CSS rendered html lists with a sytlesheet chooser
• new translations: Chinese, German, Italian and Russian
• language manager that provides tools to maintain, validate and create new translations
• improved handling of language files and character sets
• you can now extend the WizardMgr class to easily create multi-page forms, example included
• preferences system added: admin can manage default pref values, registered users can alter their own preferences
• Seagull is now able to run in shared hosting environments with safe_mode enabled
• new web GUI for modifying config values
• core framework files relicensed to BSD for greater flexibility
• simplified install, added more user-friendly error messages to ease first time setup
• many bugfixes, optimisations and general code cleanup

We have also started the Seagull documentation wiki which will eventually supercede the dated overview docs.  Check it out for more project info, developers’ bios – help up get the docs up to speed with the rest of the project.

A special thanks to all the developers who helped getting great features in this release, in alpha order: Andy Crain, Henry Juan, Werner M. Krauss, Gerry Lachac, Radek Maciaszek, Ilya Nemihin and Pierpaolo Toniolo.

Dotgeek is glad to announce the new site and a new interesing offer: PHP5 totally free hosting, no banners, no catch. This offer is reserved to PHP developers at all levels. On the site you will also find some further information on the Second PHP Marathon. Sponsored by Zend.

John Coggeshall has put together an interesting approach to running PHP4 and PHP5 concurrently on the same server – I’ve never seen Apache’s ProxyPass directive before, this is a great way to use it.

Doubtless there are stacks of PHP programmers drooling over PHP5’s new features but not willing to replace their current PHP install with beta code – well here’s how.

I can only hope this is not widespread, I just received the following spam:

===================

Dear user of Phpkitchen.com,

We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may
contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe,
please, follow the instructions.

For more information see the attached file.

In order to read the attach you have to use the following password: 02310.

Sincerely,
The Phpkitchen.com team http://www.phpkitchen.com

===================

If only I had such a nice marketing department If this is indeed the broadcast spam message it appears to be and others are receiving similar emails, please totally disregard it. Not sure whether to take this as a compliment, and I don\’t know where these people get their ideas from – rest assured any email addresses registered with this site are never made public nor shared for nonsense purposes.

Not that I thought any reader of this site would unzip a spam attachment

Judging by the logs and keywords searches that get folks to this site, there are a lot of people interested in getting info on the latest and greatest free software framework solutions.  I use framework/CMS in the title because I believe there is a lot of crossover – although there are some who will argue religiously against this point. 

A CMS as I understand it is a software product which allows a user to compile a collection of content in various media and provides various tools to sort and manage the content.  Examples of CMSs are film listings sites, social network sites, blogs, etc.

A framework is perhaps one step backwards in terms of detail, it’s a system of code that acts as the glue to keep your application together.  Examples of web applications that have nothing to do with content management might be an inventory control app, a graphical statistics analysis tool, a control panel for server administration – admittedly there is still some crossover. 

All of these examples would arguably be faster/easier to build if they were based on a framework structure that provided basic application services to units of functionality (modules) supported by the system.  Examples of basic app services might be session management, preference/config management, templating, caching, etc.  Anyone who’s programmed at least one non-CMS application will go to a considerable length to avoid having to recode all the ‘plumbing’ elements in his/her next project.

Although this site has a bias because its maintainer is also working on a framework project, I propose to assemble a ratings system that will collect public opinion regarding the multitude of FS/OSS framework/CMS solutions currently on offer, and present the results back to the public.  At the moment PHPkitchen comes up fairly highly for a google search on PHP framework, so this seems as good a place as any to do it.

Via Web Standards Project BUZZ, here’s a great list of reasons to make the effort to have your projects adopt web standards.  I started a new project recently and was asked, “Why use divs/css instead of tables?” so here is a proper explanation for those still wondering:

1. The Web Standards
2. What are Web Standards about?
3. A mindset change
4. Semantically correct markup
5. What is valid code?
6. What is accessible code?
7. Why use CSS to separate content from presentation?
8. A CSS based site in action
9. How do your VISITORS benefit from Web Standards?
10. How do your CLIENTS benefit from Web Standards?
11. How do YOU benefit from Web Standards?
12. What are the downsides
13. How do you achieve Web Standards?
14. Conclusion
15. Web Standards resources

(Please don’t take this site as an example, as soon as I can get a few more modules finished I will be moving over to the Seagull framework).

TinyButStrong is a Template Engine for pro and beginners. It’s a single Php class with 8 methods and 2 properties. The TBS tags can be visible with any Visual Html Editor.
TinyButStrong supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and other databases in native. It merges blocs, sub-blocs, multi-columns, Html lists/radio buttons/checkboxes, sub-templates. It also performs headers, formats, conditional display, event functions, …
You can find Manual, Examples, Support and Forum at the web page.
-> TinyButStrong site
-> Examples
-> What’s a Template Engine?

Via Tony Bowden, the blogsphere can actually be listened to, quite a bizarre experience.  I was impressed by the variety of robotic accents available and the overwhelmingly technical subject matter – surely there must be other things to talk about.