Task Develop an extension that supports incoming and outgoing SMS messages. As provider (SMSGateway), pswin.com is choosen because of its devloperfriendly profile. But of course any provider could be choosen. Outgoing This was the easy part. I used the excelent extension ezmailing by Benedikt Grande (based on the initial work by Lukasz Serwatka). I simply rewrote the thing to send SMS in [...]

It seems like all of the buzz in the PHP community lately is about the proliferation of several PHP frameworks including the Zend Framework, Symfony, and eZ Components. In response to this surge, several developers are offering their opinions on the matter, including Wolfgang Drews, maintainer of DynamicWebPages.de.

There are now so many Frameworks out there for php (just have a short look at dmoz, there are 46 listed, missing some wellknown ones like ezComponents, ZendFramework, Solar, Symfony, Code Igniter, ..., and what about PEAR??) - but which one are you going to use? Well, i guess it is a challenging question, especially if it is now up to you to decide this for a new starting project. Probably all frameworks have some strengths and weaknesses, but how long does it take you to evaluate them? You need some faster criteria to decide, and maybe these one will help you.

The "must have" questions he shares include:

• Is the framework well documented?
• Is the framework backed by a well known company?
• Does the framework fit into your IT-landscape?

Each is as important as the next and together they, and their answers, make for a well-rounded look at each framework.

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   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

With the Stylist Feature there is now a panel on the right side that offers contextually sound CSS styles for the user to chose from. Like for example a factbox or just a simple emphasize tag. I've also added the Smilies plugin (it seems like anim gifs don't work inside Xinha, so if you insert such, it will freeze at some point in his life) and on a more serious note the Equation plugin: x y (it's obviously more of a toy than a real solution for complex equations; if you want real equations, it's probably best to stick to TeX) You can try it here And last but not least, I committed the 1000 patch to pubsvn today.

I will be speaking at the MySQL Users Conference 2006 in Santa Clara on Wednesday the 26th of April.The topic of the session is Web Application Clustering with MySQL. Zak Greant will be co-presenting with me.

Negli ultimi giorni sono usciti un paio di articoli molto interessanti riguardo il futuro di eZ publish.

- eZ publish 4.0 features list: dove si spiega anche come mai il rilascio di eZ publish 4.0

Negli ultimi giorni sono usciti un paio di articoli molto interessanti riguardo il futuro di eZ publish.

- eZ publish 4.0 features list: dove si spiega anche come mai il rilascio di eZ publish 4.0 è stato spostato nel 2007 e quali saranno le nuove features
- Intervista sul futuro dello sviluppo di eZ: brainstorming tra sviluppatori, dove si annuncia tra l'altro che Frederick Holljen lascia la guida dello sviluppo a Vidar Langseid.

Nelle features di eZ sono stati inclusi anche alcuni suggerimenti che avevo fatto, per cui sono particolarmente contento.

Entrambi gli articoli sono molto interessanti e secondo me rappresentano bene la filosofia open di eZ systems. Complimenti a Sandro per il suo ottimo lavoro di Knowledge Manager.

Di oggi è invece l'articolo che riassume il partner meeting a cui anch'io ho partecipato. Così adesso sapete cosa sono andato a fare in Germania in pieno inverno...

In this week, we bring to you news about a new article "eZ systems Partner Meeting: Jan 25, 2006", being a summary of the first partner meeting. Furthermore, you will read about the new sub-releases of eZ publish as well as an update on the current bug status.

People like simple solutions - they like to go out, find a piece of software that does what they want, and push it out into the wild of the internet on their site. More often than not, unfortunately, they don't take the proper time to really look over the application. They breeze right past that state and install it without a care in the world. Too bad this can lead to bigger issues down the line.

In order to help ease this problem, Harry Fuecks has a post on the SitePoint blog with a few tips on how to evaluate your PHP applications before you even install them.

Now not everyone is a programmer or a system administrator-"normal human beings" rank these highly because they relate directly to the two most pressing problems they're facing: they want a site which is visually attractive and, with limited technical expertise, installation can be a significant hurdle to overcome.

But when it comes to security or maintenance, those requirements rank pretty low down. So here's some different things to think about, following on from this talk (PDF) on page 19, which I'd argue rank much higher when evaluating a project you plan to use (further suggestions appreciated).

The points he mentions include:

• What's the security record like?
• What's the code like?
• Who's using it?

For each, he describes why the step is important and how you can work through it - even if you're not that technical. Personally, I'd start with the last one on his list - "Who's got an opinion?" - and work my way from there. If there's one thing it's good for, the internet is definitely a great place to get opinions. So, Google the best you can before even considering a piece of software - it might yield some interesting results.

Based on a post from the Eclipse PHP newsgroup, the ThinkPHP blog has posted about the possible integration of XDebug with the PHPEclipse project.

They also make mention of the two Eclipse projects in the PHP community - the Zend PHP-IDE project and the older, but still being developed on PHPEclipse project.

PHPEclipse currently seems more open to community contributions than Zend's PHP-IDE project. On the other hand Zend's working more closely together with the Eclipse Foundation on the PHP-IDE project than the PHPEclipse project does.