MySQL Server 5.5.2-m2, a new version of the popular Open Source Database Management System, has been released and is considered of beta quality, so use caution if choosing to install it in a production environment. This release, called Betony, contains “m2″ after the version number, signifying the 2nd milestone in the MySQL Development Cycle, which is designed to have GA (General Availability) releases more frequently in order to allow for faster implementation of new features and updates. Betony is a candidate for GA release, but is not guaranteed to be a GA release.

To install 5.5.2-m2, follow the MySQL installation documentation located at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/installing.html, and be sure to read through the upgrade considerations located at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html. You can find a full list of the changes/improvements in 5.5.2-m2 at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/news-5-5-2.html.

Over at PHPWomen they have launched a new initiative to encourage (Open Source) projects that embrace diversity, and provide a welcoming and friendly atmosphere for contributors. They want to put projects with these characteristics in the spotlight by partnering with them, and helping them to further identify needs to make the atmosphere even better. Their definition of diversity is based on gender, race, religion, age or background.

The most important thing if you want to partner with them your open source project needs to inform visitors of how they embrace diversity by either placing a Statement of Diversity on the projects’ site. You can also choose to otherwise make clear that everyone is welcome, regardless of their diversity. In short, you need to convince the PHPWomen staff that they should associate their name with your project.

So far there are seven partners: Spaz, Habari (fellow php|architect blogger Carl Anderson made a post about this project recently), Phergie, PHP-GTK, PHP Documentation Team, Lithium (also checkout what Marco Tabini wrote about Lithium), FUDForum. If you want to join a friendly and open community, join any of these projects. If you have your own and you think you could do better, or are already doing great, join the PHPWomen OS partnership program. After all you get the best quality and most innovation in free and supportive environments.

NetBeans IDE 6.9 Milestone 1 is now available for download. Among other things, this release adds the long-awaited feature of Zend Framework support. Previously, many Eclipse and Zend Studio users wouldn’t even consider NetBeans because of this deficiency.

The Zend Framework support is still in its infancy, however. Some initial configuration is required to point NetBeans at your Zend command line tool. It also doesn’t bundle the library when you create a ZF project from scratch, though this is on their todo list. NetBeans lets you do many of the same things you would do manually from the command line: add actions, controllers, views, and the like. It also allows more seamless navigation between related items, such as views and actions.

If symfony is your framework of choice, this Milestone still offers something for you. Many users have custom directory structures for their symfony projects. This release of NetBeans will now properly identify those projects as symfony projects, despite the custom structure.

While not PHP-specific, many users will also appreciate the new CSS-related features. NetBeans now supports some basic refactoring of CSS code and allows you to see where your CSS is used throughout the site. Code completion is also improved for CSS, saving time and improving accuracy when referencing ids and class selectors.

For full details of what’s new in this version, check out the release notes. Estimates place the final release date for NetBeans 6.9 some time in Summer 2010.

We are ever so proud to announce the release of the February 2010 issue of php|architect—coming to you a whopping three days before the end of the month (hey, that’s three days better than last month!).

Our indefatigable editorial team brings you another magazine chock full of PHP goodness, including articles on:

• Creating Custom CMS Solutions with Digitalus Framework
• FaZend: Object Relational Mapping
• Managing Hierarchical Data in a CMS
• Building an Application in the Clouds
• Web-based Retrieval: Part II
• Security Roundup: Privacy? What Privacy?
• Drupal Corner: Setting Up Drupal on a VPS

As always, we have a shiny dedicated page for the February issue, which is available for purchase for the lowly sum of $5—though, of course, you can have your copy for much cheaper if you subscribe instead.

The newest player in the ever growing market of PHP frameworks is the PHP Fat-Free Framework (also called F3). The framework is a real lightweight; the basic functions are embedded in one file, one class, consuming only 39kb of disk space. This basic functionality includes a very simple to use Router, nifty template system and an easy-to-use SQL Handler. Everything you need to start creating a site. An important advantage of the framework is that the only requirement is PHP 5.3+. No PHP PECL modules, no PEAR libraries, no external classes nor third-party components. It’s all there, in one class.

Since this framework is quite new there are almost no tutorials available yet. Don’t let that scare you off, the documentation on the site is excellent. It’s on the same page as the one linked to above (if you don’t see it, scroll down). Contained within the download is also a handy quick reference card that lists all the functions. Also included in the download file is a file called F3ex.php which contains some extra’s like a CAPTCHA generator.

Using PHP 5.3 gives F3 the advantage of namespaces. As long as you put your functions in different files you can name the same since the framework wraps each file into their own namespace. Variables are also in these namespaces, so using the same variable name in different pieces of your code is possible without getting bugs you can’t figure out how to fix.

Taking the Fat-Free concept even further they provide an automatic way to compress Javascript/CSS with their F3ex.php expansion pack. Even the filesystem becomes lighter — F3 does not enforce a file structure unlike other frameworks do.

One thing is sure, this framework is anything but usual, yet it is very usable. I think we will see some great and smooth running, sites made with this framework in the future.

The Habari Community has released version 0.6.4. This release centers mainly around security enhancements and workarounds for changes made to PHP itself.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Habari is a free, open-source blog engine written in PHP.  It supports several database backends, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.  The initial developer release, version 0.1, was launched on April 3, 2007.  Since then, point releases have come every few months, and version 0.6 (the current release) was launched on April 6, 2009.

Release notes for Habari 0.6.4 are available, and include a list of all the changes.  Of interest to many Habari users will be the changes made to work around how PDO creates objects in PHP 5.2.12 and 5.3.1.  Users of Habari that have either of these versions of PHP installed will need to update to Habari version 0.6.4 to restore functionality.

Also of note is a security-related change to inline editing—this has been moved from core code to a plug-in, as mentioned in the release notes.

You can download Habari 0.6.4 from their download page if you’d like to give it a try.  If you’re upgrading from a previous version, make sure you’ve backed up your existing database before you perform the upgrade, lest something go wrong!

As always, the Habari Project welcomes feedback on potential security vulnerabilities.  Thus, if you think you’ve found a problem with this release, you’re encouraged to contact security@habariproject.org to alert them to the issue.

The PHP development team has released PHP 5.2.13, which contains over forty bug fixes, including a number security updates related to data randomization, safe_mode validation and a possible open_basedir/safe_mode bypass in the session extension.

Other notable updates include updating strip_tags() so that it no longer removes tags longer than 1,023 bytes if they are in the exclude list and fixing the date() function so that it shows the correct year. The full changelog can be found on the PHP site, where you can also read the full release announcement.

All users of 5.2 should look at upgrading to this newest release, especially since it includes security enhancements. Source and binaries for 5.2.13 are available on the php.net downloads page. If you are using 5.0 or 5.1, there is an upgrade guide to help you move up to 5.2.13.

Matthew Weier O’Phinney, the lead developer of the Zend Framework project, has released the second maintenance release of the 1.10 series. This is the release that follows naturally the Bug Hunt Days of the last week, when about 50 bugs were closed.

More importantly, after three months of public discussion between contributors on the Zend Framework 2.0 roadmap , he created a “development-2.0” branch in the official Subversion repository, by mirroring the current trunk. While the 1.x branch will not be discontinued and critical bugs or security issues will be addressed in the 1.10 or hypothetical 1.11 line of development, the 2.x branch will be the first to take advantage of PHP 5.3 features, such as namespaces. Many PHP frameworks have decided to jump on the 5.3 bandwagon, in the hope of stimulating its adoption by hosting vendors and Linux distributions.

The 2.x branch will also see many simplifications of the development process: require_once() statements are currently being stripped in favor of autoloading, and the test suite is being updated to leverage recently introduced PHPUnit features (bootstrap files and configuration of test suites via annotations). The 1.x code will be also fully converted to namespaced classes.

Finally, there is already a discussion on the 2.x branch going on: whether the newborn codebase should be managed via a Git or Subversion repository; if you intend to contribute to Zend Framework you may want to participate and express your opinion. The main advantages of continuing to use Subversion is the ease of importing external libraries (Dojo) and its strict access control that allows checking for CLAs by contributors. Git is a powerful infrastructure for distributed development instead, which would end the infinite series of patches uploaded to the bug tracker and stimulate integration of unstable code in private repositories.

Symfony lead Fabien Potencier has posted a new set of Symfony 2 benchmarks on the project’s site, showing that Symfony 2 is faster than many of the common PHP frameworks out there, including Symfony 1.4.2.

Paul Jones, who develops Solar, however, tried to reproduce Potencier’s results and was unable to confirm his findings. Jones has posted his results and details of his tests in a blog post titled, “Running the Symfony 2 Benchmarks“. He found that Symfony 2 is only 5% faster than Solar 1.0.0beta 3, compared to Potencier’s findings of 20% faster, and had trouble reproducing the Lithium and Flow3 benchmarks using . the latter’s code; according to the blog post, Jones intends to investigate the code provided by Potencier to see if there is a discrepancy there that is causing the failures.

All in all, php|a is pleased to see that Paul’s benchmarking process is being utilized by other frameworks, and we are looking forward to seeing faster frameworks in the future.

With a year like 2009 behind us, it’s inevitable that a curiously large number of PHP developers are currently in a state some like to describe as “funemployment.” It’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many in the community are currently looking for jobs—although it’s interesting to see that a large number of the folks we speak to are not just looking for any job, but for the right job.

Naturally, the concept of “right” job varies from person to person; some people want a position with a good advancement path, while some others are looking for a specific work atmosphere.

Regardless of what your goals are, I am sure that there is an article or blog post out there that tells you which PHP-related skills you should make sure you keep honing to guarantee the best chances of success, running through the list of frameworks you should know, object orientation techniques you should be familiar with, best practices you should… practice, and so on.

But being a PHP developer is much more than writing PHP code. In fact, good PHP skills would be something that I would take for granted that every PHP developer should have—and, if enough employers are as crazy as I am, there’s a chance that I’m not the only one who wants to look beyond mere PHP to decide who is good and who is exceptional.

Therefore, here is a list, in no particular order, of “meta-skills” not directly PHP related, but connected with your ability to function well as a PHP developer in today’s demanding work environments.

#5 — HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Let’s face it: artists hate coding; developers hate the fact that artists don’t understand HTML and CSS; and designers hate both because they have to explain to the former what can and can’t be done with CSS and then listen to the latter whine about the fact that former don’t “get the web.”

If you’re building PHP applications for the web, there really is no excuse not to be extremely well-versed in HTML and CSS coding without having to know anything about the principles of design itself. Hate them or loathe them, to quote Stephen Fry, both technologies are central to today’s user experience; unfortunately, neither HTML or CSS seems to have been designed by people of sound mind—and they have been implemented in the leading browsers in just as crazy a way.

And let’s be clear: by “well-versed,” I don’t mean that you can string together a web page, Geocities-style. Given the dependency of today’s websites on frontend work, you need to know how to organize your code well, create properly-coded web pages and make them work well with PHP. Unless you are lucky enough to work in an exceptionally well run group, you will find yourself at a bottom of a chain in which you will need to fix mistakes made upstream by designers. Honing your skills in the unholy trinity of frontend development will make you an invaluable team member—and is sure to raise your profile at interviews.

#4 — Understanding business

When I went to university, basic business classes were a required subject of study for every aspiring engineer. While there was no expectation of churning out technologically-savvy accountants, the powers that be understood a basic fact: technology is supposed to enable processes. In the real world, you don’t write abstract programs that calculate π to the n-th decimal place—you write programs that solve practical problems (granted, calculating π may be a practical problem for some, but let’s not lose focus here).

The success of any software project is directly related to its ability to serve a specific purpose, which it can’t do unless the people who build it also understand that purpose. Therefore, a good developer who also have a good understanding of general business concepts is of great value to any company—particularly considering the fact that far too many businesspeople have a really hard time explaining how their companies work.

#3 — Coming to grips with reality

If you think that being a PHP developer means writing PHP code… you’re probably only half-right.

In addition to being comfortable with front-end technologies, you also need to come to grips with the fact that hardly anyone writes pure PHP code anymore. Most mid-size organizations have standardized on a framework or other, while the majority of clients will expect you to build their products using a pre-existing solution of some kind—whether it’s Drupal for content management or WordPress for blogging, refusing to look outside your own little box is going to cost you either clients or job opportunities.

You may think that frameworks and CMSs are inefficient, poorly coded and error prone. Maybe they are; but, for better or for worse, a lot of large sites run on them. Employers (and clients) are likely to look at their development work from an efficiency perspective—and a developer that costs $100,000 a year is going to be made more efficient by the clever reliance on existing technologies.

#2 — Using the phone

I don’t know how many times I’ve said this, but I can’t, for the love of me, understand the weird relationship that so many techies seem to have with the telephone. It’s a hundred-year-old technology; everyone from the CEO to the receptionist understands and can use it; it’s simple and efficient. Yet, developers seem to have an aversion for it.

Here’s a hint: sending an e-mail does not excuse you from ensuring that your message is received. When it isn’t—because e-mail is anything but a reliable method of communication—your boss or your client is going to think that it is your fault, and not his (or hers). And you know what? They’re right. They won’t want to hear about how calls aren’t efficient, or you didn’t want to disturb them, or you didn’t want to waste time.

So, please—please learn to use the damn phone. If you’re worried about leaving a paper trail, send your e-mail and make a phone call. The world will be a better place for it.

#1 — Being humble

I am sorry if this comes as a surprise, but a blog and a Twitter account do not a star make. Believe it or not, there are plenty of other people who have access to the same technologies and, most likely, make better use of it than you do.

Being proud of your accomplishments, an outspoken member of the community and a published author are, generally speaking, great ways to raise your profile and make yourself heard—not carte blanche for arrogant behaviour. Employers and clients want to know that they engage with the best, but they don’t need to be reminded of it every fifteen seconds.

What’s far more important is the fact that your high profile shouldn’t give you any sense of entitlement. Your hilarious tweets and ground-breaking blog posts are unlikely to make anyone think that they owe you anything. Approach your job knowing that you are good, but prepared to know that there are others from whom you can learn—and all sorts of new doors will eventually open for you.

Photo courtesy of Cal Evans.