One conference is over and another one is already in the works. I've been invited to speak about PHP & Performance at OSCON on August 3rd, 2005. This is my first visit to a non-PHP specific conference as a speaker and I very much look forward to it.

The PHP|Tropics conference was a great deal of fun and an excellent break from the monotony of work, sleep, work... I would like to thank the organizers (Marco & Arbi) for taking the time to organize this event and have it go without a hitch. To those who decided to skip the sandy beaches and the inviting pool to hear the talks, my sympathies :-). The slides from both of my talks are now available online at: Starting PHP Performance Talk: PDF PowerPoint Flash Aside from the PHP related matters a new term was coined during the conference; shifted - To be left drunk and penniless at night in down town Cancun.

Here goes the 1st pre-release of FUDforum 2.6.13. The focus of this release has been stabilization of the code and fine tuning of the previously added features. Changes: If .htaccess is to be obeyed, make sure $_SERVER is created. When merging topics port the read statuses and notifications from source topics. Don't raise notices during charset conversion. Fixed decoding of messages to plain text for NNTP/Mailing list post backs. Many fixes to nested category display on the front page. Improvements to the captcha code generation. Fixed adding users to primary groups during consistency check. Fixed changing of user logins via admin interface. Corrected building of FUDforum zip archives (install/upgrade). Better handling of SQL server version detection (PostgreSQL 8.0). Fixes to pager generation in PATH_INFO theme. Fixed rebuild of primary PATH_INFO theme during upgrading. Fixed bugs that caused HTML entities to appear in bookmark titles in the PDFs. Added missing URL session id...

This release is the culmination of the RC1-RC3 changes in addition to few small bug fixes added post RC3. These include updates to the Russian translation, better post login redirection logic and splitting of existing topics into new forums. The install and upgrade scripts are available from: http://fudforum.org/download.php 2.6.12 also addresses a minor security issue inside the error logging code on certain installations running on Apache. Full details of the problem can be found here.

Another small bug fix RC that hopefully brings us yet another step closer to the stable release. Major Changes Include the following: [list] [] Improved Invision Board conversion script, it now supports 1.3.X versions. [] Updates to the Russian translations. [] Improved search result format. [] Added the ability to generate a PDF archive of private messages. [] Added a script that simplifies the process of logging in a user into their FUDforum account from other applications. [] Multibyte handling for e-mails. [*] Slight speed improvements and garbage collection. [/list] This release can be downloaded here.