The call for papers for next year's eZ publish Conference is out.

eZ is accepting proposals on the following topics:

• eZ publish
• Enterprise CMS
• Enterprise PHP

The submission deadline for all proposals is January 16, 2006.

eZ publish Conference 2006 will take place in Skien/Norway from June 20-23, 2006.

Of course, the eZ Enterprise Components [1] will be a hot topic there, as well as the forthcoming eZ publish 4.0.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

[1] Components from SVN Tutorial

On Nexen.net today, there's a large new list of PHP/MySQL application security alerts accumulated for this last week.

The list includes problems with: AlstraSoft Template Seller Pro, EasyPageCMS, Horde, Mambo, the PEAR Installer, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, and PHPSysInfo.

For the complete list and links to more information about the issues, check out this full post...

Many congratulations go out to Wez Furlong for being awarded the "Oracle PHP Developer of the Year" award for 2005.

You may remember that Oracle Magazine were asking for nominations to honour people that have worked in some Oracle-related facility over the past year. Someone nominated me for the "PHP Developer of the year" category, and I "won" the award.

I'm normally a bit sceptical of awards because they're somewhat arbitrary and tend to be rather intangible, however, Oracle Magazine have gone the whole nine yards to counter that intangibility aspect. I suspect that I won the award as a result of my efforts in developing PDO, the PDO OCI driver and my role in the redesign of the oci8 extension.

He also mentions the work that Antony Dovgal has put in on the same extension as well. You can also check out the formal article on the topic...

Sabato sarò a Cesena per tenere un talk su IA e eZpublish. Durante il weekend ho fatto un brainstorming con me stesso e quindi vi segnalo i temi che andrò a trattare:

- IA e CMS: cosa sono
- eZ publish: enterprise key features
- scalabilità dei contenuti
- progettazione dell'architettura delle informazioni
- blueprints e struttura del sito
- creazioni di classi di oggetti in eZ
- il sistema di templating in eZ
- wireframes e template
- relazioni tra contenuti
- categorie
- link tra contenuti e relazioni tra oggetti in eZ
- keywords/tagging
- tags in eZ publish
- flussi di produzione e eZ workflow system
- sistemi di navigazione: menù e breadcrumbs
- personalizzazione (eZ users)

A seguito del mio intervento ce ne sarà un altro su eZ publish, tenuto da Francesco e dal taglio più tecnico.

ps: spero di riuscire a vedere anche qualcuno di quelle zone (Pesaro, Ancona, chennesò )

Last weekend we had a PHP developers meeting in Paris to discuss PHP 6. (More about that later). Ofcourse when you're in Paris you need to see some of the sights. Together with Marcus, Andrei and Jani we toured the famous landmarks in Paris. On the left you can see the Eiffel Tour and below the Arc de Triomphe.

The other pictures can be found in my gallery.

During the conference in Frankfurt I visited the local Zoo with Ilia and Sebastian to take some pictures.

Unfortunately most of the animals were inside, and it's quite hard to take pictures through think glass. But atleast you can get really close up pictures without your head getting torn off.

This shows really well what an aperture of 1.2 does - you can see that only a very small amount is in the focus area here.

Outside we found two leopards, one was constantly moving, but this one was quietly laying and watching around.

The rest of the pictures from the Zoo are in my gallery.

My German slides for ContentmanagerDays 2005 are now available for download in the talks area. I explained how eZ publish is being used for Enterprise Application Integration in a common project of eZ systems and Siemens Business Services. The eZ publish implementation allows to track the usage of paletts using RFID chips. Does not sound like a CMS-thing at all when you first hear of it, but nicely demonstrates the power of eZ publish.

We did it! Brookins Consulting is now officially eZ publish partner! Announcements eZ systems partner news, Brookins Consulting and Brookins Consulting on ez.no).

In Ben Ramsey's latest post today, he talks about filtering user input and some of the wealth of discussions that have come up about it on the php-general mailing list.

Richard Lynch even tossed out a few of his ideas concerning the use of a $_CLEAN superglobal variable that would merely serve as a reminder to programmers (through its constant use in the PHP manual) to filter input as a "best practice" (see here and here). Furthermore, on Chris Shiflett's blog, Richard comments that "[s]urely our base solution for minimal Security should be a fundamental part of the PHP language, not some add-on second thought."

I tend to agree with Richard, and that's why I've been paying attention to the PECL Input Filter extension.

Ben starts from the beginning, talking about the Input Filter's roots (from Derick and Rasmus), and Richard's point about security tools being a "fundamental part of the PHP language". He gives an example of a form and how an integrated PHP extension might look to handle the filtering, and his personal opinion on the matter:

It should be noted that it is just as easy to filter input without these built-in functions, but, perhaps, with the inclusion of these functions, it will encourage others to start properly filtering data.

On his blog today, Richard Davey has posted this new book review of one of the latest offerings from the "Practical Guide" series - "Multi-Tier Application Programming with PHP".

At this point in PHP's dynamic evolution there is a new buzzword doing the rounds: "enterprise". It is becoming commonly accepted that PHP is a capable language choice as part of an enterprise solution; this book plays upon those thoughts and offers the readers a chance to witness the author build a complete PHP application with multi-tier architecture and scalability at its core, something of a dream for those of us who are at the level where they are progressing beyond the single server/application environment.

In this book author David Wall shows us how to create a PHP application based specifically on a multi-tier architecture and design. The question is: does it live up to the claims?

He explores the book, noting that it might have missed the target audience a bit. The book also suffers from content that can cause what he calls the "chapter skipping syndrome" - dropping chapters as you go along because of their attempt to match a wider audience. The book covers what you'd expect - an intro to multi-tier (from an MVC approach, using SOAP), creating classes, HTTP protocols, and more. Richard's overall view of the book?

But for those who were really hoping for a solid grounding in multi-tier application design and implementation, you'll be left feeling cheated out of your hard earned money. There is a large gap in the PHP book market for a title of this nature, sadly this one doesn't come close to filling it.