On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:

Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?

There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.

Johannes Schluter has pointed out a "hidden gem" for PHP 5.3 in his latest blog post - the fileinfo extension.

This series is not meant to be complete but some personal choice, these blog postings are also no replacement for documentation, but just pointers. My goal is that you try out 5.3 right now so we can fix bugs as soon as possible before releasing it The NEWS file has a quite short entry for my first subject: Added fileinfo extension as replacement for mime_magic extension. (Derick)

He looks at one situation where the extension could come in very handy - getting the content type of the file for a download push - as well as why its better than the older mime_content_type function.

Robert Basic has a new blog post looking at the filtering extension included with most PHP5 distributions.

Filter extension? Maybe it's nothing new for some of you, but it is for me. I've never heard of it before. So I quickly hopped over to PHP.net and the Filter chapter of the manual.

The filter extension (included as of PHP 5.2) helps clean up and validate user input - really any input - like number matching, regular expressions and email addresses. He includes some examples of filtering strings, email and integers as well as ways to sanitize the same strings, ensuring they are valid and clean values.

Adam Hosker has posted some of the differences between PHP4 and PHP5 to help you make the transition.

He's broken it up into a few different sections:

• Language Features
• Objects
• Magic Methods
• Selected New Extensions
• Error Management

Each of the sections has several subpoints detailing changes, updates and tips. The post is a part of his studies working up to talking the Zend Certified Engineer test.

Abhinav Singh has posted a guide to PHP extensions - what they are and how to write a simple "hello world" one.

Assuming you have read the previous post, lets discuss on how to build our first PHP extension: every PHP extension is built out of minimum of 2 files, a configuration file (config.m4) which tells us what files to build and what external libraries are needed and source File(s) which will contain the actual functionality.

He builds up an example skeleton for an extension (the config.m4) and explains how the file will be phpized and configured. Next up is the php_sample.h header file where the needed modules are loaded and the sample.c file to define them. Last, but not least, comes the extension code itself that calls the printf function to output the "hello world" message.

Knut Urdalen has passed along the announcement about the 1.0 release of the Yii framework for PHP being released (by Qiang Xue).

The Yii Framework builds upon learnings and findings from over 5 years of development of PRADO. If you already know PRADO you'll get the hold of Yii quite fast. The framework is already documented quite well in The Definitive Guide to Yii (a good place to start for beginners), in addition to complete class reference and an active forum where you can meet other developers.

There is also an extension repository and a few benchmarks to help you compare it to some of the other popular frameworks out there.

With the release of another DLL driver for PHP on Windows to access Oracle databases, Chris Jones wanted to alleviate any confusion there might be between the two in a new blog post.

As I foreshadowed in a now distant post, Pierre has installed Oracle 11g Instant Client on the PHP Windows build box and updated the OCI8 build scripts for PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6). PHP 5.3 now has two mutually exclusive versions of the OCI8 extension DLL [...] The two DLLs have the same user script API that do the same thing. You only need to (and only can) enable one at any one time. Choose the one that matches your Oracle client libraries.

The two DLLs - php_oci8.dll and php_oci8_11h.dll - have pretty self-explanitory names, but it could be confusing as to whether you need both or not if you go the 11g route.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today from Vikram Vaswani about accessing a database with the help of the MDBTools PECL extension to read from a Microsoft Access datbase.

In this article, I'll introduce you to PHP's MDBTools extension, which provides an API to programmatically read data from Microsoft Access database files. If your project involves working with such files, extracting database records either for calculations or for conversion to other formats, you'll find this extension invaluable.

He steps through the installation of the extension (via the pecl command line tool) and some sample code that grabs the tables, all of their attributes and how to select the data out from them.

New on the Zend Developer Zone there's a tutorial written up by Wil Sinclair looking at building dynamic PDF files in PHP with help from Haru.

This incredible versatility also applies to the topic of today's article: the PDF, or Portable Document Format. Not content with just one, PHP actually comes with two different extensions that allow developers to dynamically generate PDF documents: the PDFlib extension, and the libHaru extension. Over the next few pages, I'm going to take a quick look at the Haru extension, providing you with a brief overview of its functions and demonstrating how you can use it in your PHP development.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the extension and several examples of it in use - everything from simple text input out to text transformations, drawing shapes and adding annotations.

Taylor Luk submitted some info about a project he's been working on for a while and is ready to release into the wild and see how useful it can be for others - H2o Template, a Django-inspired templating system.

I have been developing this for quite a while, started as a fun project to do django like syntax and compiles down to php code. Unlike the last django-like template for Zend Framework, this one is more stand alone. After couple major rewrite, now i am releasing 0.3 beta.

The syntax of the templates is pretty similar to Django and it includes a built-in caching driver, an extension system that allows for external filters/tags/extensions to be added in easily and internationalization support. He's currently using it on a CakePHP website in a view class on a production system.

Get more details and access the source on the project's github page.