This week we bring you news about the ezcGraph component, eZ publish sub-releases (including security fixes in versions 3.8.4, 3.7.9, 3.6.11), and also the weekly forum watch and an update on the current bug status.

php|architect's Pro::PHP Podcast has posted their interview with Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone on their site (as recorded live last Friday):

Uh Oh.... time to chat with the chattiest character in the PHP blogosphere, formerly the roving reporter and now Editor of Zend's Dev Zone, Cal Evans. Cal's got a lot to talk about too. Zend Framework progress, PHP5 Certification, a couple of conferences he'll be at this year and PHP's FileMaker pro support?!?

You can grab it directly here and have a listen. Also, be sure to check out the upcoming show with the latest news in all things PHP with Marcus and Sean.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial looking at one of the unsung heroes of the web development world - one that, when you need it, it does what it does well - SQLite.

Is a full-blown database server even necessary for most PHP applications? What about a data-driven website like a blog or a simple family photo album or message board? In these and may other cases, the small, simple, and extremely powerful SQLite may be all you need. Let's take SQLite out for a test drive and see how it performs, find some of the quirks you might run in to, and how to get the most use out of it.

They talk about SQLite being a "staple" in PHP for a while now and how PDO plays so well with it. They move on to the code quickly, giving a simple example of how to create a database, and table, and inserting content into the latter.

Other more advanced features are discussed - data types, speed of queries, using transactions, and cleaning up the code to really make it fly. They even talk about "user defined aggregate functions", a method to make running a set of data through the same processes over and over a snap.

php|architect's A/R/T article repository has a new tutorial posted today with a look at logging in your application (the entire application) with the help of the Zend Framework by Stefan Koopmanschap.

There are different reasons for logging information, different strategies for what and how to log, and of course different ways of implementing it. This article will look at why you would want to log, what you want to log and how to do it.

They introduce application-level logging, how it can help, what it can show you, and how it can make finding security issues even easier. They get into the code a bit later on, showing how to use the Zend file functionality to write out to a simple log file. They enhance it with a bit more information in the message, and show how to set a prefix/suffix to each line automatically (like a timestamp and a newline).

DevShed is starting another new series today with part one of their look at "Building an Invoicing System" - building the login script.

In this first part of "Building an Invoicing System," we are going to look at invoice management. Why would anyone want an online invoicing system? Well, if you are a freelance web developer like myself, you will undoubtedly need to invoice your clients so as to be able to get paid at the end of the month. This application will help you to manage your client details as well as your invoices.

It's a basic level tutorial, and starts from the basics - being sure PHP and MySQL are installed and working together. They offer a few troubleshooting tips if things aren't working right before giving you the database schema and the actual (simple) script to use for logging in a user.

Ce billet est un le premier d'une probablement looongue série d'articles ne contenant que des liens qui me paraissent intéressants sur le modèle des En vrac du Standblog mais sur lesquels je n'ai pas forcément le temps de m'étendre.

• Webrankinfo publie un guide assez détaillé sur comment optimiser son blog pour le référencement
• Dans la même veine, IndexWeb donne 10 conseils pour lancer son site sur de bons rails pour le référencement
• eZ systems publie eZ publish 3.6.11, 3.7.9 et 3.8.4 qui corrigent des failles de sécurité jugées importantes, heureusement ces failles ne sont possibles que dans certains cas finalement assez particuliers. Mise à jour fortement conseillé ! Va falloir que j'y pense.
• David Szerman nous annonce la sortie en Alpha de Fluxbuntu version d'Ubuntu construite autour du gestionnaire de fenêtre fluxbox dans la lignée des Kubuntu, Xubuntu. À quand une Openbuntu basée sur Openbox ?
• Comme beaucoup de gens vous êtes contre les OGM (Organismes Génétiquement Modifiés) et pourtant vous en avez peut être mangé à votre insu ou votre voisin en cultive peut être sans que vous le sachiez . Et pourtant c'est illégal, merci la France de n'avoir pas encore transposé une directive européenne vieille de quelques années !

In this new post on Zak Greant's blog, he takes a look at some comments made about the eZ partner program he helped to develop and his responses to clear up some issues.

In a blog post yesterday, CMS expert and Optarian Seth Gottlieb wonders about the eZ partner program.

Gottlieb made comments about it seeming to be a good system, but not quite understanding how it would work when applied. Zak comes back with comments on the reasoning behind the program, how it works to benefit the partner, and how they see those partners, both in giving credit and their involvement with the projects.

For more information on the eZ partner program, check out this page on the eZ website.

With just a quick handy code snippet posted on his blog today, Derick Rethans shares these two lines to help grab the start and end dates of a week in question.

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The code makes use of the ISO8601 datetime functionality to grab the correct value from a strtotime command. Derick also briefly explains how it all works.

DevShed continues its look at the Decorator pattern with this new article today talking about working with MySQL result sets inside of the structure of the Decorator pattern.

Definitely, the pattern in question can be used for generating different types of outputs (or views) based on a returned result set, by using a few decorator classes that I'll define in the course of this tutorial. Hopefully, when you finish reading these lines, you should have a clear idea of how to include decorator classes in your object-based PHP applications.

They start off by showing how they're going to handle the MySQL result sets normally with a class and how to use that class in an example. Finally, they tie all of that in with the Decorator pattern, creating multiple Decorator classes to handle the various MySQL result set types.

On the Builder AU site, there's this quick look at using the APC module (a PECL package) to help speed up your applications.

Looking to get every ounce of performance from your Web server? If you're using PHP scripts, you can easily accomplish this using PHP's APC module, which caches php opcode instead of forcing php to reinterpret every script every time it is executed.

The install is simple (on PHP5) and they show some configuration options you can use to fine-tune the performance of the module to fit your needs. There's also a brief look at what the module actually does to the scripts as they get interpreted and passed out of PHP and into the web server.