ComputerWorld: "Probably the simplest and most effective change that will come with PHP 5.3 is a modification to the way that $_REQUEST superglobal variables are handled. After several years of known vulnerability, it seems that the PHP developers are finally addressing one of the most risky elements of the scripting language."

Complete Story

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that teaches users to create and modify themes for Drupal websites. Written by prominent Open Source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, Drupal 6 Themes helps users create a striking new look for their Drupal websites with clean layout and powerful CSS styling.

Drupal is a free Open Source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS). Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Written in the programming language PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design means it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.

Magento 1.1 was released last week.  Magento is an open source ecommerce platform (shopping cart).  Several weeks ago, I discussed some of the expected features in Magento 1.1.  Be sure to check out the original announcement for more details on Magento 1.1.

Packt is pleased to announce the release of WordPress Themes Design, which is a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, this book will be invaluable to WordPress users or visual designers who want to develop a WordPress theme.

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is a new book from Packt, which acts
as a practical tutorial for creating Drupal 6 modules with PHP. Written by Matt
Butcher, this book will help users to walk through the development of complete
Drupal 6 Modules.

Drupal is a free and open-source modular web
application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It
can run in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.
It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code.
These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers
who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for
them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing
modules attest to Drupal's flexibility.

IBM developerWorks: Discover
PHP's new features and syntax improvements and see how they will take
this already-popular scripting language to the next level. Learn how
Unicode support, Web 2.0 features, and other changes make PHP V6 more
robust, as well as more international.

Complete Story

The PHP development team started the month of May with the release of PHP 5.2.6. With over 120 bug fixes, this release is mainly focused on stability. There are however several security enhancements in PHP 5.2.6:

• Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.
• Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.
• Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.
• Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
• Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

References: Release Announcement, PHP 5.2.6 ChangeLog, PHP.net Download page

There is a new version of TYPO3 available, version 4.2.  There are lots of usability and performance improvements in this latest package. 

The main focus of the new 4.2 version is improving usability, but there are also many enhancements for system administrators and developers. Including bug fixes, there are nearly 650 enhancements in TYPO3 4.2.

What is very interesting about this version of TYPO3 is that it is one of the first CMS that have dropped full support for PHP 4 in a stable release.  TYPO3 and a number of other Web projects took the "goPHP5" pledge earlier this year and we watched it happen.  To run TYPO3 you will want need to make sure you have PHP 5.2 or greater on your Web server. 

TYPO3 version 4.2 can be downloaded from TYPO3.org. Technical documentation and the release notes can be found at typo3.org/development/articles/release-notes-42.