Chris Jones has announced the release of the latest version of the Undergroupnd PHP & Oracle Manual.

A hot-off-the-press, free, 290 page, updated version of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual is available for download from http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/underground-php-oracle-manual.pdf. [...] The previous edition was released way back in May 2007. Since then, Oracle Database 11g and the OCI8 1.3 extension have been released, there have been various changes in PHP community, and I've simply just gathered more notes, examples and have more information to share.

The manual has doubled in size and includes tons of new content reflecting the updates since the previous release. Chris thanks those who helped in creating the content, helped get it out to the community and his co-author Alison Holloway.

The symfony blog has start up their own "advent calendar" of sorts (similar to what they've done in previous years) - creating an entire application in a single month, from December 1st through 31st. This time its the jobeet.org jobs website. Here's the list of each day:

• Do you know Jobeet?
• Jobeet - Day 1: Starting up the Project
• Jobeet - Day 2: The Project
• Jobeet - Day 3: The Data Model
• Jobeet - Day 4: The Controller and the View
• Jobeet - Day 5: The Routing
• Jobeet - Day 6: More with the Model
• Jobeet - Day 7: Playing with the Category Page
• Jobeet - Day 8: The Unit Tests
• Jobeet - Day 9: The Functional Tests
• Jobeet - Day 10: The Forms
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 11: Testing your Forms
• Jobeet - Day 12: The Admin Generator
• Jobeet - Day 13: The User
• Jobeet - Day 14: The Lazy Day
• Jobeet - Day 15: Feeds
• Jobeet - Day 16: Web Services
• Jobeet - Day 17: Search
• Jobeet - Day 18: AJAX
• Jobeet - Day 19: Internationalization and Localization
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 20: The Plugins
• Jobeet - Day 21: The Design Day
• Jobeet - Day 22: The Cache
• Jobeet - Day 23: The Deployment
• Jobeet - Day 24: Another Look at symfony

Stay tuned to the Symfony blog for more updates!

Its the holiday season and even the PHP community is getting into the spirit. Much like last year, >Chris Shiflett (joined this time by >Sean Coates) have created this year's PHP Advent calendar.

From Chris Shiflett's blog:

Is it December again already? I like good traditions, so with the help of Sean and many others, PHP Advent is back again, this time with its own domain. I would call it a web site, but that might be stretching the truth at the moment. Jon is going to help us out with a simple design in the very near future. The focus, of course, is the quality content from our gracious authors.

The December 1st post for this year is one by yours truely - You Need the PHP Community. For more great content as the month goes on, you can keep up either through their feed, on Twitter or just by heading over to the site each day.

For the Eclipse PHP developers out there anxiously awaiting the next major release of the extension, you'll have to wait just a bit longer. Max Horvath mentions a few of the reasons why:

As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.

The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.

Chris Hartjes has posted about an event happening in Buenos Aries in December 2008 - CakeFest (#2):

The CakeFest site as been updated to announce pre-registration and other information about CakeFest #2, which will be held in Buenos Aries, Argentina at the beginning of December.

As of this post, the speakers haven't been selected (want to give a talk? The Call for Papers is still open through June 13th, 2008!) but you can find out more about the conference and the location on the conference website.

The php|architect group has released their December 2007 issue today. Articles featured in this issue include:

• Going Native With mysqlnd by Andrey Hristov and Ulf Wendel
• Understanding CLI by Dirk Merkel
• Web Scraping by Matthew Turland
• Product review: SQLyog MySQL GUI-Enterprise Edition by Eddie Peloke

...and the three usual columns - /etc, Security Corner and exit(0) from Marco Tabini.

You can get more information about this issue and on ordering it (or a year's subscription) from this page on the php|architect website.

php|architect has posted their November and December training class schedule online today that includes all of their courses:

• PHP Essentials
• PHP Certification Combo
• Professional PHP
• Building Rich Internet Applications With PHP 5 and AJAX

Classes start at around $770 USD and, as an extra incentive, their iPod Touch promotion is still going on. Order any training class and get a free iPod Touch delivered right to your door. Only training purchased between September 18th and November 30th of 2007 are eligible, so be sure to get your order in in time!

Here's the latest statistics on the usage of PHP for December 2005:

• PHP 5.x usage grows up to 5% (at the same pace as months before). The release of PHP 5.1 seemed to have no effect.
• PHP 4.4.4 continues to enjoy strong use, despite the differences between it and older versions like 4.3.10 and 4.3.11.

Some of the other items they measure include: adoption by country, number of servers running it by country, and the adoption of PHP in Canada for the month. Note: the page is all in French, but the graphs are easy to understand...

Included in this edition are the following:

• Special Feature: Where in the World is PHP? - an overview of how PHP stands currently (the sample article for this month)
• PHP Web Services - a look at them with a focus on SOAP
• Advanced SQLite Development - more than just the casual use

...and much, much more, including the cover story "An Introduction to Drupal". So, head over and grab your issue today - either through the savings you get through a subscription, or the grat price of a single issue!

In this issue, they talk about:

• Stored procedures and functions in MySQL
• Advanced Development with SQLite
• Logging and Monitoring with log4php
• and an Interview with Marc Delisle

Check out the full description for all of the contents in this issue. Plus, there's a link to the sample article for this month, "Logging and Monitoring with log4php".