I suggest a more retro-active approach [than trial and error]. Studying, surrounding, and forcing yourself to abide by best-practice coding standards will yield surprising results in your applications despite the fact that it may seem like more work than it's worth.

Topics included in his list are things like:

• Always develop with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT
• Portability, Portability, Portability!
• Don't over-think!
• Validate & Sanitize your Inputs!

Check out the rest of the post for more suggestions and explainations.

I've been asked a lot of times which is the best PHP framework. Well, it's a very difficult question to answer this question and there are some pros and corns in each framework. So, today I would to hear your views via poll.

Included in the list are CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter. Coming out with around forty-three percent of the votes, though, is the Zend Framework with CakePHP following with twenty-two percent.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)

We had so much fun presenting during last year's conference, we thought we'd do it again. The session is a pre-conference tutorial session, running for 3 hours on Monday morning, 30 October 2006.

The session will be divided up into two different main sections - programming practices and tools and processes. Each of these have their subsections, including test drive development/unit testing, project documentation, and collaboration tips and tools.

The talks followed three topics:

• Best Practices - security, performance up to basic OOP features in PHP and debugging
• Object-oriented programming - "OO Candy store"
• and the ever-popular "Enterprise PHP"

Even though a lot of crap applications have been written in PHP, some applications really shine in excellence. Not only are they very usable, they are also coded well, secure, and well-documented. I've compiled a list of applications for a number of genres that stand out in my opinion.

Included in his list are applications like:

• phpMyAdmin for database administration
• JpGraph for graphing and statistics
• Smarty for templating
• Drupal for community and content management

Packt Publishing is currently looking for people to nominate their favourite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/award. The five projects that receive the most public nominations will go through to a final round of voting, with a panel of judges and votes from users deciding who receives the $5,000 prize.

The award will be voted on by a panel of judges and visitors to Packtpub.com and is designed to "recognize and reward outstanding achievement in a high quality and highly competitive marketplace".

For complete information, check out their official page for the contest.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

At the request of a listener to past podcasts, Scott created this one to share some of his experiences and findings along the path of his develoopment. Some of the items covered in the podcast include:

• package and library management
• naming conventions
• the seperation of UI and business logic
• code distribution
• using test harnesses

You can download the MP3 of the podcast directly from here.

The second post is more of an overview of the conference, mentioning what a success it was - well-organized, good talks, plenty of help, good equipment, and great catering for speakers/helpers. The "flow" of the PHP room seemed to go well (from his comments), with only the hackaton being a bit lacking.

Congrats to all involved with this year's FrOSCon! Here's to hoping for even better times at the next conference...