We wanted to give a big thank you to Jon Lebensold for the great work he is doing with Zendcasts. He is really helping the Zend Framework community with some of the best Zend Framework webcasts out there and we are very excited to be sponsoring Zendcasts for our very first episode on the topic of Doctrine Relations and Data Fixtures. Exciting stuff baby!

Check it out at zendcasts.com

We are offering a special promotion of 10% off using the coupon code “zc” on any hosting product to celebrate this occasion.

A recent blog post at symfonynerds stated that the popularity of Drupal was hindering the success of PHP frameworks, especially symfony. It’s a very interesting perspective on the subject, but in my opinion, this is not the case.

Drupal calls itself “an open source content management platform” and this is a pretty accurate description of what it does. If some people make the mistake of comparing Drupal to other frameworks like Django and Rails, we can hardly blame Drupal.

If symfony and other PHP frameworks want to get better known it needs to come from within the community. Historically any successful framework, CMS or programming language has had a vocal community backing it up. This means the community wore the colors with pride and also took part  contributing and evangelizing for the framework, either developing tutorials, contributing code and helping out in any way they can. Most importantly we need to start developing cool open source projects based on our frameworks. This is extremely important to make these frameworks more popular outside the groups that already know them and especially for beginner developers. By creating applications on top of our favorite frameworks, we will start to create a marketplace and demand for labor around them. Current developers use these frameworks to create custom and internal sites and applications that usually don’t get released to the public; this does not help the framework. If we want to give back to the project that has helped us so much by giving us a powerful tool, then we need to do something about it. Some people contribute to the core development of these projects; others write documentation, blog posts, tutorials, answer questions on IRC, forums and mailing lists. These are all very valid ways of giving back. But creating an open source project around a framework would also help the framework, a lot! Think about it.

The web is ripe with old PHP applications that need to be re-invented, CMS, blogging platforms, image galleries, etc. Creating one of these applications from scratch most of the time does not make sense, but if you provide something new built using your favorite framework and allowing to add custom functionality by following the same standards of the framework, you are offering a very valid value proposition.

Here are some cool open source projects based on popular frameworks that are worth checking out:

• Sympal – CMS (symfony)
• Apostrophe – CMS (symfony)
• qdPM – Project management (symfony)
• siwapp – Invoice generation – (symfony)
• veevid – Video sharing (symfony)
• Magento – eCommerce (Zend Framework)

These are projects that appear to be alive and have been active for quite some time. There are a bunch of other interesting projects that seem to have been left with broken links, outdated websites, etc.

As you can see, the list is not long and this is obviously not a good sign. But one thing is clear; we cannot blame Drupal for this. A simple search for “Rails open source projects” leads to a bunch of results to sites like http://www.opensourcerails.com/ and this article all generated by an active community. The same goes for Django.

So help your framework, start a cool open source project or join an existing one, I am sure this will help a lot.

Finally, after this long rant, I think we need to release something ourselves. Expect us to release our Livechat system as an open source platform in the near future. It’s actually quite cool as it interacts with GTalk and does a bunch of other fun stuff.

If you know of any other noteworthy open source software built on Zend Framework or Symfony frameworks, add them to the comments below.

The Zend Framework development team announced the availability of Zend Framework 1.9.5 which includes almost 30 bugfixes, many of them from this month’s bug hunt days, demonstrating how important is the help from the community. For a complete changelog, go here.

This release is already available in all our servers for our customers.

For more information about our Zend Framework hosting offering, click here.

An important part of our job is to stay up to date with technologies. Conferences are a great way to do it. Not only you will learn new things no matter how senior you are, you will also meet great people with similar interests.

We support many conferences, as many as we can. And we also try to attend frequently. Here are some of the most interesting PHP conferences in the coming months:

CodeWorks 2009 – Sept 22-Oct 5, multiple US cities.

From the organizers of php|works and publishers of PHP Architect, here comes an interesting new concept in PHP conferences. A great group of PHP top speakers will travel the US, giving talks in 7 different cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, D.C. and New York). Lucky, as you can see, our home town is on the list so we will be there to learn and meet old and new friends. If you will be attending or speaking, look for the ServerGrove guys. Cal Evans, one of the speakers, is posting a very interesting journal. The quality of the speakers lineup makes this inexpensive conference a must-go.

ZendCon 2009 – Oct 19-22, San Jose, CA.

The 5th edition of one of the top PHP conferences in the calendar will take place on Oct 19-22 in San Jose, CA. This is the most corporate oriented of the conferences, with a lot of emphasis on Zend Framework. This year there will be an interesting session with lead developers of all major PHP frameworks, since many of our customers use them, we encourage them to go to ZendCon this year.

Symfony Live 2009 – Feb 15-17, Paris, France.

We’ve heard that the first edition was a complete success, so we are determined to not miss this one and we are going to Paris even though it will be in winter, the best time of the year in Miami. If you are a Symfony developer, or are thinking on learning Symfony, this is the event for you. This conference will be in English. There will be talks for everyone, from entry-level to long time developers. More on this conference as we get closer to it.

Other Conferences

If you can’t make it to any of these, don’t worry, there are more conferences scheduled for the months to come. In October, PHP NW 2009 will take place in Manchester, UK. Forum PHP Paris 2009 will take place in November. If you know of a cool PHP conference not listed here, let us know!

We will keep you updated on these and other conferences. For the ones where we will assist, we will give updates as the events take place, so stay tuned. If you are attending any of these conferences, look for us and say hi!

Symfony
The symfony development team released symfony 1.0.21 with several bug fixes. This version is already available in all our servers.

Read more about symfony, or learn about our symfony hosting offering.

Zend Famework
The Zend Framework development team announced the availability of Zend Framework 1.9.2 which includes over 40 fixed issues, covering more than 15 different components. . For a complete changelog, go here. This release is already available in all our servers for our customers.

For more information about our Zend Framework hosting offering, click here.

The Zend Framework development team announced the availability of Zend Framework 1.9.1 which includes bug fixes in 17 components. For a complete changelog, go here.

This release is already available in all our servers for our customers.

For more information about our Zend Framework hosting offering, click here.

Magento is gaining popularity in the ecommerce arena. The installation process is supposed to be painless and quick, still, there is a problem when installing Magento when you already have Zend Framework in your PHP include_path, which is the case in all our hosting accounts:

Magento comes with its own version of Zend Framework, and if you have ZF in your PHP include_path already, the installation will fail with a very strange error like:

[30-Jul-2009 18:05:02] PHP Fatal error:  Function __autoload(b514i6_xp_2pia3m5o191rxqn3) threw an exception of type ‘Exception’ in /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/lib/Zend/Validate/Hostname.php on line 420

This error happens right after the database configuration screen, which in our case it showed incomplete and after entering the hostname it throws an error of a missing index db_prefix and a PHP fatal error like the one shown above.

In order to fix this problem, you need to remove the Zend Framework directory that’s outside of Magento from the include_path. In our servers, you can do this by adding the following line to httpdocs/.htaccess:

php_value include_path /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs

Make sure you replace example.com with your domain.

Once you make this modification, reload the database configuration screen and you will see the complete screen. The installation after this goes smoothly.

The Zend Framework development team announced the availability of Zend Framework 1.8.4PL1 which includes a missing patch for Zend_Loader_PluginLoader that provided some critical functionality for Zend_Amf users.

This release is already available in all our servers for our customers.

For more information about our Zend Framework hosting offering, click here.

If you follow PHP news closely, you probably know that today is an important day. PHP 5.3 has been released, featuring some big new features in development for quite some time. Because we know how important is to take advantage of new features, we configured a new VPS image with PHP 5.3.

If you plan to purchase a VPS hosting plan with PHP 5.3, make sure you select the right version in the order form so our provisioning system selects the right image. If you are a current customer and want to run PHP 5.3, let us know and we will help you upgrade free of charge. Please make sure that your applications are PHP 5.3 ready by reading the upgrade guide.

Additionally, our VPS image includes the following software:

• CentOS 5.3 & Ubuntu 8.10
• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5.1.35
• PHP 5.3.0
• APC 3.1.2
• memcached & memcache PHP extension
• symfony 1.2.x (older versions are also available)
• Zend Framework 1.8.4
• many more.

Many developers and users already know symfony. If you don’t, check it out! It is one of the most popular and useful PHP frameworks that help ease the pain associated with building web-based applications. Many large sites and lots of smaller ones are developed using symfony, including our website and many of our internally developed applications.

One of the nice things about working with symfony is it’s decoupled nature. You can use the full-stack framework or, disable and use only parts of the framework that you need. You can use (or not use at all) different high-quality ORMs (like Propel and Doctrine). Continuing with this philosophy, the symfony project team lead by Fabien Potencier is releasing some of the components that will be powering the next version of symfony. The components are available independently, so developers may use them to suite specific needs in a given project.

Currently, from the published list, only the Yaml component is available for download. The rest will follow soon, and we expect they will have the same high quality of the symfony framework.

The components are:

YAML

Description from the site: Symfony YAML is a PHP library that parses YAML strings and converts them to PHP arrays. It can also converts PHP arrays to YAML strings.

Yaml is already used in symfony to define different configuration aspects of an application. It’s super easy to write and it gets converted to PHP code to acchieve excellent performance. By using this component, you can define the configuration of your application using Yaml even if you don’t use symfony. This is an excellent resource for any developer.

Event Dispatcher

Symfony already features a very powerful events system, which powers over 600 plugins. This has proven to be one of the keys to the success of the framework. We are sure that when this component becomes available it will provide excellent possibilties to enable applications to be extended and will allow developers to expand their systems features by accepting 3rd party plugins.

Dependency Injection

Fabien Potencier has been very active explaining what depency injection is and how it can help with complex development scenarios, linking and interfacing classes. He has also released what we think it is a mini version of the soon to come full component. As he said, the Dependency Injection component will be at the core of the next Symfony framework and we expect this to be a major resource for developers.

Templating

There has been a lot of discussion over the need of a templating engine in Symfony. It is now known that the next version of Symfony will include one, but it will be optional like most of the features of symfony, which is great for those that do need the extra complexity. This component means that there will be yet another option in the templating engine arena, where Smarty is probably the front runner.

Mysterious components

There are two other components listed in the page, without names or descriptions. We are very curious as to what these components will be. Knowing the current quality of the work being released by the Symfony project team, we are sure it will be exciting and we can’t wait to know more about them! If you know anything about them, or want speculate, leave us a comment.

Closing notes

As you can see, these are very exciting times for PHP developers, including those not using symfony. The components are and will be used within other frameworks, like Zend Framework, CakePHP and many others. They can also be used independently in small projects that use no frameworks at all. We are very excited about these developments and look forward for a very bright future of complex, powerful and amazing web based applications powered by these components. We will keep you updated when these components become available to the public.