The PHP development team started the month of May with the release of PHP 5.2.6. With over 120 bug fixes, this release is mainly focused on stability. There are however several security enhancements in PHP 5.2.6:

• Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.
• Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.
• Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.
• Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
• Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

References: Release Announcement, PHP 5.2.6 ChangeLog, PHP.net Download page

There is a new version of TYPO3 available, version 4.2.  There are lots of usability and performance improvements in this latest package. 

The main focus of the new 4.2 version is improving usability, but there are also many enhancements for system administrators and developers. Including bug fixes, there are nearly 650 enhancements in TYPO3 4.2.

What is very interesting about this version of TYPO3 is that it is one of the first CMS that have dropped full support for PHP 4 in a stable release.  TYPO3 and a number of other Web projects took the "goPHP5" pledge earlier this year and we watched it happen.  To run TYPO3 you will want need to make sure you have PHP 5.2 or greater on your Web server. 

TYPO3 version 4.2 can be downloaded from TYPO3.org. Technical documentation and the release notes can be found at typo3.org/development/articles/release-notes-42.

Packt is pleased to announce the availability of its new book on Elgg, the free open-source tool used to create social networks. Written by Mayank Sharma, the book teaches users to create their own fully customized, hosted social network for their business, organization, or group of friends.

Elgg is an open-source social web application licensed under GPL version 2, and runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform. It offers a networking platform combining elements of blogging, e-portfolios, news feed aggregation, file sharing, and social networking.

Following the latest release of Drupal 6 in February 2008, Packt Publishing is pleased to announce an update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book. Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is as much of an overhaul of the original book as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

The updated book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from establishing the need for a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

SkyBlue Canvas is a lightweight, zero-config CMS designed specifically for jobs where more robust systems like Joomla, Mambo and Drupal are too much horsepower. The sytem includes familiar features like the Wymeditor WYSIWYM XHTML editor, Joomla-like plugin API and simple skin architecture.

http://www.skybluecanvas.com

If you want to keep a directory of company employees, for example, you would use a directory service instead of storing that information directly in a database. A directory service is created in a directory server, which is built on top of the database."

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"PHP 6 is just around the corner, but for developers who just can't wait, there's good news -- many of the features originally planned for PHP 6 have been back-ported to PHP 5.3, a final stable release of which is due in the first half of this year."

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Packt is pleased to announce the release of a new book titled Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5. Written by Hasin Hayder, this book will teach users to understand the core object-oriented programming concepts with PHP and to write manageable applications with ease.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It was basically introduced to ease the development process as well as reduce the time of development by reducing the amount of code needed.

PHP is one of the most popular languages for web application development, and PHP5 supports OOP very well. This book will help users to master core OOP features in PHP as well as advanced Topics like Design Patterns including Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Unit Testing.

Comprehensive documentation and working examples on the Standard PHP Library (SPL), which are hard to find elsewhere, are provided in this book. Users will find this book useful to leverage PHP’s OOP features to write manageable applications with ease.

Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 is published and is available with Packt. For more information about this book, please visit www.packtpub.com/oop-php-5/book

"This post has some general tips that I’d recommend to anyone wanting to write a multilingual web application. The majority of my code these days is PHP, but I think these tips are applicable to most web programming languages."

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The last few seconds before projects and Internet hosting companies officially support PHP 5.2 via GoPHP5.org.

Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

If your PHP-based software or Web server still does not support PHP 5, I would conclude they are living in the past. I personally would be looking for something with a better vision of the future...