Paul Jones responded to recent Symfony 2 benchmarks to show that the Solar Framework is not as slow as the original tests show and in fact if it used preloading like Symfony 2 does it would be faster..

This is something I have always thought was needed and its something I brought up in Zend Framework discussions back when I was seni-involved.

If you haven't heard by now Apple stands to make some nice profit for every iPad sold so people are asking a lot of questions around pricing and why the upgraded versions are so expensive.

What those people need to do is look back at history and realize how Apple thinks. They have a brilliant marketing department that realizes the iPad might be the next big thing... But they also realize it might be the next iFlop. When a company prices a product the goal is to make money so they consider how many they think will sell, how many to order and what the price will be.

If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

A big focus of 2.0 it seems is going to be performance and cleaning up the structure to make use of php 5.3 features which is great, I have been preaching the need for ZF to start taking performance as a real concern for a while now.

I have used Trac for a long time and since the beginning the one constant regret was that it wasn't done in php!

Now granted, python is ok and I have done a bit now and then but 99% of the work I do is in php so it just made sense to me that Trac should be in php. Well now for all of you who have had the same thought Wez has come through with his Demigod powers to bring you Mtrack

Sending email using the Solar Framework is not only extremely simple but very flexible as well. Solar splits the process of sending email into 2 logical parts, creating the message "package" and sending the "package"

This is my first "short" that is PHP specific and not Solar Framework related, I hope to keep these coming as well.

A search for the phrase "secure php" on Google returns a ton of results but scanning through the first couple pages of results it becomes clear that when you talk about security and PHP people tend to focus on 2 things, the code and PHP itself.

Solar_Config is a great configuration system but at times you find yourself wanting more, by itself Solar_Config has a few weaknesses.

1. All the config is file based, changes to the config require a push.

2. If you store client config in Solar_Config files this makes #1 even worse

3. On a large site only small portions of the config may be used at once, why load it all into memory.

You have a couple options, each have highs and lows related to how they work

To understand how and were you can inject new config you have to understand how its loaded.

In your Solar.config.php

Your using Solar and decide you need OpenID support but Solar doesn't have an Adapter for that! What are you to do!

Solar makes heavy use of Adapter based classes, Solar_Auth is one of these. This makes adding additional methods pretty easy and allows you to borrow from other Frameworks without having to Hack in a third party auth setup, You can use the basics provided by Solar.

While the subject might sound dark and scary the reality is the Solar Frameworks config system is one of the things that I truly enjoy about Solar 99% of the time.

Its that other 1% you need to be aware of to keep yourself out of the rabbit hole.