We are pleased to announce that we are now offering PHP 5.3 for shared hosting as well the 5.2 version. We have been supporting 5.3 on our VPS accounts and it has proven to be reliable and stable so now when you sign up for shared hosting you can pick which version of PHP you want. Pricing for hosting with PHP 5.3 is the same as the other versions. While some PHP Hosting companies are offering PHP 5.3, many are offering it as a CGI, we tested this option and due to performance reasons we decided to dedicate a whole server to PHP 5.3. The downside is that you can’t run 5.2 and 5.3 on the same machine, the upside is that it’s freaking faster this way. Current ServerGrove customers can migrate to PHP 5.3 free of charge. Just give support a shout and request that your hosting account be migrated to a 5.3 server.

PHP 5.3 has a number of new features released, including:

• Namespaces
• late static binding
• closures
• better memory management which increases performance
• new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo)

and more. The full list can be viewed here http://php.net/releases/5_3_0.php

PHP 5.3 is specially good for sites and applications developed with frameworks like symfony and Zend Framework, as they run much faster thanks to the improved memory management. Additionally, the new branches PHP frameworks like Symfony 2, Lithium and Zend Framework 2.0 will only run on PHP 5.3 and above.

Please keep in mind that some PHP scripts and applications that were developed on older versions of PHP may not run with PHP 5.3, so it is always a good idea to test and make sure everything works correctly.

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.