Usability guidelines can sometimes be of use in awkward places. I try to apply them to source code. [...] Of course, coding guidelines are there to make the code easy to read by everyone. But code usability goes somehow beyond. Let's see some of the differences.

He compares good versus bad code in a few different areas:

• Bad Code Comments
• Split Up Code
• Cleanliness
• New Conventions
• Listen To User Feedback

Each item is described, some including code examples to help make them more clear. Be sure to check out the comments for more good suggestions.

In this article, we're going to look at how we create a simple but effective means of capturing and displaying visitor comments using a blend of jQuery, PHP and JSON. In the public forum that is the blogosphere, the ability to capture and display visitor comments on your blogs can give you instant feedback and opinions from the people that matter most '" those that read your blog.

Their script (check out the demo here) acts as an interface between a MySQL database and the HTML front end. Both the display and submission of the comments are handled by Javascript with the submission being handled by the ajax method in jQuery.

You can also download the source here.

His list of four is:

• Doc Comments
• Flexible Parameters
• Use method Entry contracts
• Be Stateful and Refactor

The "Doc Comments" is pretty obvious, but some of the others need a bit more explaining. Being flexible with your parameters is more about requiring the least from a developer, "entry contracts" being the restrictions to let the developer know what you're expecting and refactoring commonly used functionality into a easy, single point of contact.

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it's no wonder with it's ease of use and ease of customization. In this tutorial, I'll be dissecting the default WordPress theme's comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier.

The guide breaks down the major parts of the file - some of the general code, how it displays comments, the comment submission form and some "little tricks" it does to handle things like comment numbers, links and the alternating colors.

With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.

Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP, says that the Web is inherently broken and needs an overhaul to the entire infrastructure: browsers, servers and scripting languages.

Due to the nature of the Web being created very quickly, the consequences of bad decisions early on are being seen with almost all Web sites vulnerable to cross site-scripting (XSS).

Check out the video for more of his comments (you'll need Flash to view it).

They also have three other videos from Rasmus: Security on the Web, a Roadmap for PHP6 and Rasmus' retort to Rusty (Russell).

I can add that a few years ago I had bad experience with MS SQL PHP extension. It was just impossible to use it in production environment. These days MS understand that PHP is a very popular programming language and step forward to the community

He also includes a list of some of the things that the driver includes/makes possible such as the fact that it's not a PDO or OOP driver, that there's no source posted for it and that it does support data streams.

You'll find a Draft for a php-based messaging system below. We'd be glad if we get some comments from the readers. Because we're heavily using open source we want to give something back to the community and make the message queue system open source. And, yes, if someone is planning something like this or already knows a solution, please let us know, too. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel!

He fleshes out the proposal by describing it in three sections - the problem the need came from, some of the existing solutions the web has to offer (including the Java Message Service and IBM's XMS messaging) and the actual draft of the implementation including the architecture, scalability, a name (none yet) and where they're going from here.

Commonly CAPTCHA is a visual image where the user is asked to type the word they see (or hear) however some provide a logic puzzle [...] Re-captcha works by asking the user for two words instead of the normal one, one word is known to the system and is the actual CAPTCHA the second is an unknown word, if the user gets the CAPTCHA then the users "guess" for the unknown word is recorded, over time a word is given a probability score and when high enough becomes a known word.

They Also include links to re-captcha modules for two of the popular CMS/blogging tools - WordPress and Drupal - to make integration easy.

Just reading the title of the entry through my Live Bookmarks in Firefox, I can't help but think "Thank you, Stefan, for fixing a security vulnerability in PHP and making the language that I love that much more solid and secure." - Okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but it needs to be said that Stefan Esser does do PHP a good service through finding and reporting these kinds of vulnerabilities.

He goes on to talk about the other side of the situation, the actions of Esser that could lead to this sort of situation:

I know he's got his reasons for having issues with the developers, and if everything he's constantly ranting and raving about is indeed true, all the more reason to have issues. But do not lower yourself to their level, if that's the case. Constantly and consistently belittling PHP Developers and Zend Employees, whether on your blog or in the PHP Internals list itself, does not make you any better than them.

Jeremy suggests that these sort of actions (and reactions) aren't helping the PHP community step up to become seen as a more "Enterprise quality" language.