PHP 4.3.4RC1 released

[29-Sep-2003] PHP 4.3.4RC1 has been released for testing. This release candidate contains only bug fixes, so it should be quite stable. Please test this release as much as possible, so that any remaining issues can be uncovered and resolved prior to the final release.

List of changes can be found in the NEWS file.

php|cruise: The World's First Ever PHP-only Cruise

[20-Sep-2003] The publishers of php|architect have announced php|cruise, a five-day cruise to the Bahamas Islands featuring a lot of fun and over thirty different sessions dedicated to PHP from well known experts like Wez Furlong, Alan Knowles and John Coggeshall.

The cruise will take place March 1st to 5th, 2004. The organizers have announced a contest to give away one free place on the cruise.

PHP Usage Survey Results

[18-Sep-2003] Check out the results of the PHP Usage Survey conducted by Zend Technologies, including feedback from thousands of PHP users around the world. Thanks for all who contributed!

PHP Manual CHM Edition - 12th build

[06-Sep-2003] The 12th build of the extended CHM edition is out now, and available for download. This build contains updated content and user notes, as well as fixes the bugs found in the previous build. A new optional "phpZ" skin is also introduced in this release, courtesy of Gonzalo De la Pena Andreu. For more information, visit the homepage of this edition.

International PHP Conference 2003 program online

[05-Sep-2003] The organisers of the International PHP Conference which will take place for the third time in Frankfurt, Germany from Nov. 2 to 5, 2003 have announced the conference program. The conference board which consists of Bjoern Schotte, Zak Greant, Zeev Suraski, Thies Arntzen and Jan Lehnardt has chosen more than 40 sessions for the main program on Nov. 4 and 5 and 7 in-depth Power Workshops for the pre conference program on Nov. 2 and 3. Among the prominent speaking crowd is Zeev Suraski, Ken Coar and many others. See the conference website for more information.

Server Central Donates Server

[28-Aug-2003] Chicago-based company Server Central has donated PHP.net a brand new server with a gigabit connection. The box is a quad 2.4GHz machine with 2GB ram, so we're going to be using it to power our more resource-intensive tasks, including building the manual. Thanks, Server Central!

European Open Source Development Threatened!

[27-Aug-2003] Today sees an international day of protest against the move by the EU to make obtaining a patent easier within Europe. Such patents may cause Open Source software such as PHP to infringe on existing licenses and new ones, meaning we would no longer be safe to distribute PHP within Europe. Contact your EU Representative to get this cruicial vote blocked. Find out more at the campaign website

php{con west is announced

[26-Aug-2003] php{con returns to the San Francisco Bay Area with new sessions, PHP gurus and a whole new day of PHP-intensive learning. Their program features a full day of tutorials, three technical session tracks over two days, an all day coding marathon, Code Sprint, social events, works in progress, and presentations from PHP luminaries. Early Bird discounts end on September 26th. See the full program and register online at their website

PHP 4.3.3 released!

[25-Aug-2003] The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.3.3. This release contains a large number of bug fixes and we strongly recommend that all users of PHP upgrade to this version. Full list of fixes can be found in the NEWS file.

Active Awards 2003 Winners

[15-Aug-2003] The Active Awards are held annually to honor members of the open source community who actively contribute to open source languages and display excellence in their programming efforts. Programmers' Choice Award winners were nominated and chosen by the open source community. Activators' Choice Award winners were chosen by ActiveState's development team.

This year's nominees were: Monte Ohrt, Paul S. Owen, Stanislav Malyshev, Stig Bakken and Wez Furlong. The Programmers' Choice winner is Stig Bakken, the father of PEAR. The Activators' Choice winner is Ilia Alshanetsky, member of the PHP Quality Assurance team, developer of the fudforum package, and a major contributor to PHP development.

PHP.net news history

[15-Aug-2003] Ever wonder what was the original PHP 3.0 release announcement, what where the choices when the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor name was choosen, or since when you can use URL shortcuts to access pieces of our site? We have digged up some of the most interesting news items published on PHP.net since January 1998, when the site started to serve its visitors. You can find these in the news archives. There is also some historical information in the manual's history appendix.

Select mirror for redirection

[13-Aug-2003] The www.php.net site tries to do the best to choose close mirrors based on all available data when redirecting users to mirror sites. Sometimes close mirror sites are unfortunately not the fastest. This is why we have added the mirror site selection possibility to our My PHP.net service, which enables users to select a specific mirror site for redirections.

PHP Magazine web site now with daily news

[12-Aug-2003] The International PHP Magazine web site now offers daily news for PHP professionals and beginners from all over the world, helping them to stay up-to-date with the latest news on PHP and related technologies.

PHP 4.3.3RC3 released

[07-Aug-2003] PHP 4.3.3RC3 has been released for testing. This is should be the last release candidate prior to the final 4.3.3 release. Please test this release as much as possible, so that any remaining issues can be uncovered and resolved.

List of changes can be found in the NEWS file.

URL Shortcuts and Site Search

[29-Jul-2003] After many of our users requested a change in how our URL shortcuts behave when someone mistypes a shortcut, the default behaviour now is to look for a function name instead of performing a documentation search on Google. Those, who were satisfied with the Google search, can set their preference at the My PHP.net page. We are working on a better onsite search solution, Google is used temporarily to search our site.

php|architect now in print

[17-Jul-2003] The publishers of php|architect, a monthly magazine dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP, have announced the availability of a print edition of their publication. Subscriptions are now available at a special introductory price for readers worldwide.

PHP @ LinuxTag

[06-Jul-2003] From July, 10th to 13th 2003 LinuxTag, Europe's largest Fair and Congress dedicated to Open Source in general and Linux in particular, takes place in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Under the motto "PHP and Friends" the PHP Project showcases PHP and related projects, like MySQL, SQLite, Midgard, osCommerce or DB Designer, at booth F21. In addition to the booth "PHP and Friends" offer an interesting programme of technical talks and workshops which are held by 24 speakers from 11 nations and cover the latest trends and technologies related to PHP, Apache and MySQL. Among the speakers are core developers of the discussed Open Source projects, for instance Ken Coar (Apache), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) or Kaj Arnö (MySQL).

PHP 5.0.0 Beta 1

[29-Jun-2003] The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Both source packages, and a Windows build are available in the Downloads Section. A list of changes can be found in the ChangeLog file.

Some of the more major changes include:

• PHP 5 features the Zend Engine 2. For a list of Zend Engine 2 changes, please visit this webpage.
• XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
• SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website.
• Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.

Note: This is a beta version. It should not be used in production or even semi-production web sites. There are known bugs in it, and in addition, some of the features may change (based on feedback). We encourage you to download and play with it (and report bugs if you find any!), but please do not replace your production installations of PHP 4 at this time.

News Archive