Chyrp is a very lightweight blogging engine, created by the same person and ideas that worked on the Lingua Project, as profiled in this blog in April this last year. When a blogging engine initially was designed as a very lightweight application, it tend to support a specific group of users that want to personalize it as easily as possible. On the other hand, there also mean it will be less room for an user to build something out of it and trying to make this blogging engine a fully functional content management system (CMS).

The first version of Chyrp was released in December last year. I found myself delayed in writing the review of this application because of the immature of its functionality. And after the version 1.0.3, the last stable release, I can see some of the bugs or problems have been addressed by Chyrp. Chyrp indeed can be considered as a post-project of Lingua, driven by PHP and MySQL and the additional capability of Ajax. As I look at the availability of extensions in Chyrp community, there is a very small number of developers that currently working on improve the Chyrp engine. However, a differentiation advantage can arise if you compare this blogging engine with WordPress or Movable Type, both open source blogging engines, Chyrp seem to be relatively easy for beginners to maintain and they’re apparently headed in this direction.

A content management system called Xaraya is releasing a newest version, i.e. Core 1.1.4 today. Xaraya is an open source content management system (CMS) that is written entirely in PHP programming language. This version includes several enhancements and improvements, such as New OrderSelect Dynamic Data Property, General XHTML correctness, etc., however it only can be seen as the last version in the branch 1.0 before Xaraya release the upcoming version 2 in this year.

Many of my contacts are using open source CMS in delivering the client projects. Though I found that Xaraya is good especially it supports MySQL, MySQLi, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, among all the other features, but Xaraya is indeed less well-known and much too heavyweight for them and many people I found on the Web preferred Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, phpNUKE, Plone and Typo3. As a consequence, there is very few commercial book that talked about Xaraya. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the deployment and development of Xaraya is low, there is a page prepared by Xaraya that comprised of a long list of all the sites that were built by using Xaraya.

At the time Ruby on Rails released to the external developers, it has since then taken the programming world by storm. Its core is the meta programming, enabling developers to learn and code faster as so much of the codes has already been offered to the developers. However, it does not mean that PHP developers are all throwing away PHP language and take up Ruby.

It’s interesting to see PHP community, how they respond to this Web framework. Some of them has released their own designed Web frameworks that based on PHP. A typical example is Akelos, claimed as being a Ruby on Rails port to PHP. To promote this newly born PHP framework, Akelos also created a video “Creating a Blog in 20 Minutes using the Akelos PHP Framework” screencast on their Website.

What is the Perl developers respond to this Ruby on Rails? In the meantime, there is an established company, BBC of UK, a long time Perl user, has announced that they created their own internal-use Perl on Rails. Using this framework they have launched a new project called BBC programmes, as well as the proposed next-generation of iPlayer also built on this framework, according to BBC blog.

I came across the Zend Framework for quite some time, and now it’s already released in the market as a production version a couple of days ago. In fact, Zend Framework has gained noticed amongst the web developers since its went beta version in last year and some of the enhancements such as AJAX and multiple databases support were being made into this new version. Like many web frameworks, it has near-magical effects and works as promised when a good developers know how to use it efficiently. The best thing is, it is available for free. Moreover, the response of the developers toward this web framework is extremely well, with more than 1.4 million downloads for the first two days since launched, according to this article.

PHP has released the version of 4.4.5 today. As listed in their release notes, the PHP development team has included the security fixes and enhancements as follow:

- Fixed possible safe_mode & open_basedir bypasses inside the session extension.
- Fixed unserialize() abuse on 64 bit systems with certain input strings.
- Fixed possible overflows and stack corruptions in the session extension.
- Fixed an underflow inside the internal sapi_header_op() function.
- Fixed possible overflows inside zip & imap extensions.
- Fixed non-validated resource destruction inside the shmop extension.
- Fixed a possible overflow in the str_replace() function.
- Fixed possible clobbering of super-globals in several code paths.
- Fixed a possible information disclosure inside the wddx extension.
- Fixed a possible string format vulnerability in *print() functions on 64 bit systems.
- Fixed a possible buffer overflow inside ibase_{delete,add,modify}_user() function.
- Fixed a string format vulnerability inside the odbc_result_all() function.
- Fixed a possible buffer overflow inside mail() function on Windows.

This is the newest stable version released by PHP development team since August last year when they released the previous version, i.e. 4.4.4 at that time, according to the change log of this released version. Meanwhile, the current users were urged to download this version as soon as possible.

You can also download it by clicking here.