We just released the first beta for eZ components 1.1. In this release you will find the new packages File, DatabaseSchema and SystemInformation. The release also comes with updated packages for ConsoleTools, Database, ImageConversion and Mail. The first beta of the Template component will follow in a separate release next week.

On the Drupal site, there's a handy article instructing you on getting the most performance out of your server for the Drupal software.

The performance of your Drupal site is dependent on three main factors: the goals of your site, the resource demands of your site traffic, and the system performance and configuration of underlying technologies.

They seperate it out into three different sections - setting out your performance goals, analysing your site for current traffic/resource consumption, and the actual implementation of the performance settings. They give a few steps here to follow to check what your server is currently using and some links to other tips on tuning the various pieces of the puzzle.

One thing that they mention that's worth repeating to any and all web developers out there: "Apache is bandwidth limited, PHP is CPU limited, and MySQL is memory limited and disk I/O bound".

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway on June 24th an 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 EUR, and simple food and a place to sleep are provided for the two days of the event. The major expense for most attendees will be the cost of traveling to Norway.

Registration will open May 1st.

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event. Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event. The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are provided for the two days of the event. The major expense for most attendees will be the cost of traveling to Norway. Registration will open May 1st. For more information, visit http://phpvikinger.org/.

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event. Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event. The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are provided for the two days of the event. The major expense for most attendees will be the cost of traveling to Norway. Registration will open May 1st. For more information, visit http://phpvikinger.org/.

If you do any javascript and or AJAX work you need the FireBug firefox extension.

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

We all have software that we love, and we all have software that we hate. Sometimes, there's even a few times in there that there's software that we love to hate. Jim Plush has this kind of love-hate relationship with Zend Studio as expressed in this letter.

Dear Zend Studio, thank you for giving me a remarkable debugger to use which saves me countless hours during the day. Unfortunately, I hate that you make me wait 2 seconds before rending text to the screen. I hate your unusable slowness.

I hate that I bought a beautiful mac with the amazing OSX GUI but you make me disable "OS LOOK AND FEEL" just so I can type in your lovely editor. It turns my lovely GUI into a 1980's screen shot of the first linux GUI ever made. Ohhh but your debugger, you minx. It's got me hooked and I can't give it up. I've tried the others and I keep returning to your sleek lines in the first 5 minutes when you actually work properly.

Love/Hate always,
Jim

We've all been there and know this pain. It's good to see he's taking it in stride and is expressing it with such fine sarcasm too...

In this post from the Zend Developer Network, there's some talk about a web service that can be useful to any PHP developer out there - new to the language or not. Bad coding practices can lead to hard to read code, the worst of them is not formating your code correctly. Thankfully, there's PHPFormatter to help out.

Using this service, you can upload your code, beautiful or crappy and it will format it for you. If you don't bother to register, you can choose from several of the standard formats like PEAR, BSD or GNU style formatting. If you register with the site (free) you can define your own style.

Cal also includes some of the reasons the PHPFormatter crew give for making code beautiful, including bringing a project's code up to your current style or fixing a downloaded, unreadable script. You can also use it to format your code to fit with the PEAR style.

Since Kristof Coomans doesn't seem to care to blog about the cool stuff keeps on coding, I'll do it today as this time he managed to do something close to the holy grail in eZPublish hacking: attribute level edit permissions In my limited testing just a few minutes ago, this worked perfectly and solves a long standing problem in ez. Respect and thanks a lot for this!

In this post from forumtools.blogspot.com, there's information on how to integrate the Google Maps functionality into your pre-existing phpBB forums.

The integration relies on this set of scripts, a mapping application that lets users of the forums note their favorite locations in a simple interface.

The Geoforum package uses phpBB as a base, integrating simply into its structure. Users can even start discussions/topics surrounding a specific location. There are all sorts of features in the package, so if it sounds like something you've been looking for, be sure to check it out.