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Let’s take a look at two extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it’s easier to navigate and search.

Jonathan Wage has written an excellent post on the symfony-project blog showing how easy it is to get a new symfony project up and running with symfony 1.2 and Doctrine ORM.

Paul Reinheimer just wrote a post on his blog announcing that Thursday evening’s entertainment at php|works is being crowd-sourced.

Lorna Mitchell, the senior European correspondent for phpwomen.org, has posted a good piece on her blog about what she learned when she delved into Zend_Db.

When it comes to dealing with different file formats, it’s hard to faze PHP. XML documents, PDF files, JPEG images, MP3 media…you name it and, chances are, there’s a PHP extension to handle it. And so it is with compression formats like RAR, LZF and Bzip2 – although these archive formats are far less common today than the ubiquitous TAR and ZIP formats, they are still actively used by many applications and projects, and continue to be supported in PHP via PECL extensions.

If you’re building a Web-based administration tool to interact with a database, there are some routine tasks that you quickly get used to coding: listing records, adding records, and updating or deleting records. Frameworks like the Zend Framework and CakePHP come with various built-in methods to help with this, and even if you’re not using one of these frameworks, there are a number of tools that can make coding these functions a breeze.

Supporting open-source PHP projects can be done by for example contributing code, writing or translating documentation or by fixing bugs. The latter is not usually the most exciting task, but still is quite important as the amount of bugs is an indication for the overall quality of the project. With this in mind, the Belgian PHP user group PHPBelgium and the Dutch PHP user group, phpGG, have decided to work together and launched a new initiative, called PHP BugHunt Days.

If you are not familiar with Xdebug it is an extension that allows you to profile your application for various things like performance and memory usage. One of its more usefull features is the ability to profile your application to find out what method are taking the longest so you can clean up those bottlenecks in your application.

The Zend implementation of Lucene provides a powerful tool set for those looking to implement a Google-like search for their PHP web application. One of the requirements in creating a Google-like search with Zend is the creation of a stemming, stop word filtering, lower-casing analyzer. This article will briefly discuss the basic role of an analyzer in the Lucene API, my implementation of a new “StandardAnalyzer” for the Zend_Search_Lucene component of the Zend Framework, the inner workings of this analyzer, and its basic usage.

We are excited to announce that the Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available from the Zend Framework download site!