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Today we are going to do something a little different. I’ve got books stacking up here that need reviewing, so I’m going to start interjecting book reviews into the podcast stream. This week’s book is “PHP In Action” by Manning Publications

Safe mode objection; namespaces and __autoload; PHP 5.3 discussions and TODO list; Windows installer extensions; magic methods and by-ref arguments; PHP 5.2.4 released

So, you want to create your own mashup? Great! Mashups—web applications that grab information from different external sources and mix it together in new and exciting ways—are fun to build and popular with users.

Multiple namespaces - and brackets; unicode.semantics (for the last time?); constants in namespaces; integrating PHP with a homegrown server; patches for LSB, setcookie2(); PHP 5.2.4 RC 3 available for testing

Today, we are going to talk to the PECL princess herself, Sara Golemon. Sara is one of the core contributors to PHP and when she’s not coding for PHP, speaking at conferences or writing books she fills her time working at Yahoo. I had the privilege of sitting down with Sara at php|works earlier this year in Atlanta GA and talk with her about her background, why she likes PHP and anything else that came to mind.

Microsoft is releasing FastCGI for IIS6, meaning the shiny little “beta” tag is finally going the way of the dodo. What is FastCGI? I could go on for pages about the technical background, and Microsoft already has some great documentation on the subject, however I’ll put it in layman’s terms for those who aren’t Computer Science majors.

The IIS Team is eager to announce the official release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 as a free download. For the first time, we are providing hosters and PHP developers full support for a stack of technology that enables reliable, scalable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

This article will introduce you to one of PEAR’s most powerful tools for generating Web forms and validating the input that arrives through them: the HTML_QuickForm package. This package provides a flexible, reusable library of methods that can literally save you hours of time when dealing with form-based user input – and best of all, it’s free and extremely easy to use.

Namespaces or packages? [continued]; reserved word alert; nowdocs revised; namespaced constants; PHP 5.2.4 RC2 available for testing

In his article, Ralph Eggert explains how one could integrate propel to his Zend application. It’s interesting to see how an _autoload php function can be used to automatically load needed classes (propel,or Zend classes) and thus avoid having to explicitly include the propel files in every controller that would need access to the model.

Today’s special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I’ve receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. Davey is a full time developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. He is an author of both magazine articles as well as books and regularly speaks at PHP conferences. His latest book was just released, “The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition” which he co wrote with another PHP Abstract host, Matthew Weier O’Phinney. They had a lot of help from other PHP Lumminaries including Ligaya Turmelle of phpwomen.org. A link to this brand new book can be found in the show notes.

Here’s a cool present. Recently Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare.

Drupal is a fantastically well featured, and free, content management system written in PHP. No wonder so many companies are using it internally or externally as one of their business applications. But often Drupal alone is not enough. It needs to be integrated or extended to match the needs of the organization. One way to extend it is on the front-end through something like an Ajax or Flex based widget.

Today we are going to do something a little different. I was privileged to attend php|works in Atlanta. While there, between tasks, Sean Coats agreed to sit down with me and talk for a bit. Given his level of participation in php|works I was grateful for any time he was able to spare. Come listen as we talk about his work at php|architect, work on the PHP manual and programming in general. This is the first of a couple of interviews I was able to do at php|works.

There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There’s nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I’ve come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)