by Alan Knowles (alan_k@php.net)

After a weeks break due to jetlag from the PHP Conference, this weeks news covers all the events from both weeks. It was a pretty busy few weeks for discussions on the mailing list, and A considerable amount of new packages where proposed, taking PEAR closer to the point where it is larger than CPAN....  I've left out the Release summary, as this is really available at the end of the News, and have focused more on news from the list and a quick summary of all these new packages.

PEAR-DEV traffic

Include Path Solutions

After some discussion in the last few months about how to deal with PEAR package installation folders, and web hosted enviroments, Stig Bakken announced the plan to add a new directive to php, '{get,set,restore}_include_path()', to make it possible to modify the include path, even on hosted site running under safe mode (where ini_set) may be disabled.

PHPdoc to PEAR manual converter

Alexander announced the release of his  PHPdoc to PEAR manual convertor, based around the phpdoc code.

http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~meal/pd2pm-0.5.zip

Along with this, Greg Beaver also announced that he was 85% done, creating a phpdocumentor to peardoc2 convertor, between the two, the options for quickly building manual documenation is considerably easier now.

New Peardoc mailing list

Pear manual writing has now got it's own mailing list, So if you want to help out document some of the great packages available in pear sign up by sending an email to
  pear-doc-subscribe@lists.php.net

PHP Documentor comming to PEAR

Greg Beaver announced the release of a new version of phpDocumentor, an actively worked on phpdoc to html/pdf etc. tool. he also announced his intention to package it up and  make it available via the pear installer and web site.

Graphing Packages in PEAR

Richard Udovich Announced he had started working on a Graphing Package, a long discussion followed regarding the JpGraph Package which is already in the php cvs tree, which is available under a dual licence, QPl, and a commercial one.  

Bugs and Fixes

Thanks to these people for spotting and fixing some bugs Paweł Gołaszewski, Arnaud Limbourg, Mika Tuupola and Yavor Shahpasov. Since there was nearly 500 messages in the last two weeks, I've probably missed a few fixes, this does not mention the many fixes that are sent directly to the maintainers as well..

New and Proposed Packages

Spreadsheet_Excel, for working with Excel files

Xavier Noguer announced his Excel writing class, based arround the CPAN Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module by John McNamara, It includes many features for writing and creating excel files on the fly, including the basics of setting cell data, along with formating, formulas, images and alot of other stuff.. after some discussion of the name, it should be appearing in PEAR shortly.

XDB - an XML database interface

Richard Samar announced an wrappers to access XML Databases Xindice and Tamino.

Pager_Sliding - a richer Pager class

Lorenzo Alberton announced a new Sliding Pager Class, which has a similar API to the existing Pager class in PEAR, but offers a richer interface. Lorenzo was very generous and implemented a Template friendly addition.

PECL::SPPLUS - access for a french Payment gateway

Nicolas Chaillan announced a php extension for accessing the French bank Caisse Epargne's payment gateway.

HTML_Template_SmartyLite - SimpleTemplate

After a discussion with Alan, at the PHP Conference, Wolfram Kriesing announced his intention to make Simple Template, his Smarty like Templating engine, which features I18N translation tools, and Caching available in PEAR. The idea is to merge the features of HTML_Template_Flexy, which was a fork from an older version of SimpleTemplate back into the Core and replace HTML_Template_Flexy.

MySQL UDF - embedded PHP in Mysql

David Sklar announced a Mysql Extension that enables you to write stored procedures in PHP within Mysql, this uses the new PHP embedded build avaiable in the forth-comming PHP 4.3.

DataObjects for LDAP

Chrigu announced his intention to develop a DataObjects type interface package for LDAP

Mnogosearch - a new wrapper to the search engine

Bertrand Mansion announced that he had created an updated interface package for the Mnogosearch search engine, enabling it to be used with any of the common PHP template systems eg. Smarty and HTML_Template_IT.

Numbers_Spell

Piotr Klaban announced a package that converts numbers into Words in a variety of languages, currently American, British and Polish are supported.

Data Structures

Robin Johnson announced that he was intending to develop a series of classes to deal with Data Structure storage, in a similar way to that done by Java Collections.

Development

Active on CVS this week has been Cache, Cache_Lite, Date, DB, DB_DataObject, DB_ldap, DBA, File_Find, File_HtAccess, FSM, HTML_Javascript, HTML_QuickFrom, HTML_TreeMenu, Log, MDB, Net_URL, PECL::apd, PECL::mailparse, PECL::optimizer, PECL::python, PECL::spplus, SOAP, Text_Password, XML_Transformer, PEAR.