Have you ever been on #ezpublish the official eZ publish IRC channel on the freenode network? No? Did you know that except official eZ publish forum on ez.no, you can share your information with eZ crew and eZ community in real chat on official eZ publish IRC channel #ezpublish? You don't know how to connect? This is very easy. Just take a while and read tutorial "Using the Network". You will find there all important information how to connect and how to use basic commands.

Looking forward to talk with you on #ezpublish official IRC channel ;)

With the Zend Framework making such a splash in the PHP community, people can't seem to get enough tutorials and information surrounding it. So, in an effort to feed that need, Zend has published this new tutorial covering the Zend_Search_Lucene package.

One of the features that sets the Zend Framework apart from the others is the inclusion of a decent search module. Zend_Search_Lucene is a php port of the Apache Lucene project, a full-text search engine framework. Zend_Search_Lucene promises a simple way to add search functionality to an application without requiring additional php extensions or even a database.

Zend_Search_Lucene overcomes the usual limitations of relational databases with features such as fast indexing, ranked result sets, a powerful but simple query syntax, and the ability to index multiple fields. Better still, a Zend_Search_Lucene index can live happily alongside your relational database to provide fast searching but without duplicating the effort of storing all of your data twice. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use Zend_Search_Lucene to index and search some RSS feeds.

Mostly due to the simplicity of Zend's Framework setup, the tutorial isn't too long. It looks at the creation of the index (with a sample of fetching RSS feeds) and how to use this index to search their contents. There's even an outline of what kind of data can be associated with what kinds of fields.

[digg it]

I finally brought xeditor into a state where one can likely use it without too many fears (well aside of the fact that it won't ever go back to using non XHTML of course). Fixed the dreaded entity bug (which is really more of an ezxml weirdness) and also noticed that special chars (such as umlauts ;) were mangled and hacked my way around that, too. To top it off, I did some experiments with copy pasting formatted texts from Word and OpenOffice 2 on Windows (in both IE6 and Firefox 1.5) and I'm content to report that it retains most formatting (at least as far as it actually makes sense in HTML). Tables, Fontsize, bold all remain. And even more to my surprise, it even works between Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.2 on Linux! w0000t As always, you're welcome to try it here

Attention all PHP User Groups out there - listen up! There have been a few announcements about user group meetings on this site, and I'm coming to you to ask for more.

If you've ever wanted to expand the audience of your user group but haven't gotten much of anywhere, let us post the information about your latest meeting. Getting the name of your group and the fact that it exists can only help. PHP user groups can be a great place for developers of all skill levels and backgrounds to come together, socialize, and maybe even learn a thing or two.

If you'd like to submit your user group information for posting on the site, send me an email to enygma@phpdeveloper.org and mention that it's in reference to this post. The best is if you have a feed that can be subscribed to, but if you don't a process is being put in place to allow user group members to provide us with the needed info without having to email it each time.

So, drop us a line and let us know about you and your group!

I've done some benchmarking today with eZ publish CMS and MySQL running a process inserting articles (objects) into the CMS system. I ran the test on both the standard GCC compiled version of MySQL and the Intel ICC compiled version. The total process was 11.9% faster and the MySQL part was 20.2% faster. So atleast on heavy write operations the ICC compiled version of MySQL is running faster with eZ publish. This is good news for people running write intensive eZ publish sites. When testing with read queries I did not see that much of a difference, I will do more tests on heavy read intensive operations to find where we can gain performance also here.

There are features in every language that developers love to have - in PHP, there are some impressive string and array handling functions that some developers would like to carry over. Unfortunately, there are also some bits of functionality that haven't quite made it to PHP yet - namely collections. In other languages, such as Java or C#, these handy containers let you hold objects for use later. PHP lacks this kind of functionality inherently, but this new DevShed article might just have a way around it.

A collection is an object whose primary function is to store a number of like objects. An object called CarCollection may contain any number of Car objects. Collections can traditionally be accessed in the same manner as arrays, which means CarCollection[n] represents a particular Car object. This is true in C#, Java, and more - but not PHP, unfortunately. Since PHP has only recently begun to develop a package of built in objects (the SPL, Standard PHP Library), the ability to support collections in the accepted behavioral sense is very limited.

Their mission is to work with a datatype that PHP does have to simulate this kind of collection handling - arrays. They walk you through the creation of a foundation class, one that simply allows you to get and fetch from the array. Extending that makes it possible to create a customized method for sorting personal data (name).

Zend has officially announced their Call for Papers for their Zend/PHP Conference and Expo for 2006. The conference, happening October 29th through November 2nd, will be held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California.

Zend Technologies invites you to participate in what will be the premier forum for PHP in 2006. Present your technical concepts, cutting edge applications, or business applications. Your participation will make this conference a success. Share your ideas with fellow colleagues in the PHP community.

The conference selection committee will consider all abstracts submitted on or before June 15th, 2006. Notifications will be made by August 1st, 2006.

The theme for this year is "Creating Modern Web Applications with PHP" with three tracks for you to work up a proposal for - "PHP and Web Services", "PHP Development", and "PHP Management".

For complete details on the hows, whens, and whats, check out the Zend site for proposal specs, compensation, and the right way to submit.

eZ publish 3.7.5 is the latest update of the 3.7 branch of the eZ publish content management system. Previous sub-releases contains a bug which doesn't allow to choose 'hostname' as access method for the site. Current update contains a fix for this bug.

eZ publish 3.6.7 is the latest update of the 3.6 branch of the eZ publish content management system. Previous sub-releases contains a bug which doesn't allow to choose 'hostname' as access method for the site. Current update contains a fix for this bug.

eZ publish 3.5.10 is the latest update of the 3.5 branch of the eZ publish content management system. Previous sub-releases contains a bug which doesn't allow to choose 'hostname' as access method for the site. Current update contains a fix for this bug.