The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. [...] Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head programmer on a conference call, and they ended up sending me a technical assessment quiz.

In the quiz, there was one question the prompted him to come up with his tips - ten things that you can do to keep your code clean, lean and easy to maintain. His tips include things like "use single-quotes around array indexes", "don't use open short tags" and "document your code". Some of the suggestions don't make that much of a difference, but others (like the documentation one) can make the world of difference down the line.

At 24./25. of September 2008 there will be the OpenExpo in Winterthur. I will be in charge of the PHP booth. I am looking for PHP-Developers, -Evangelists and -Fanboys (and girls) to help me out.

PHPers already attending include Harry Fuecks, Lukas Smith and Chregu Stocker. If you're interested in helping out at this year's conference, see his post for more details on contact methods.

Simplicity and extensibility are the main reasons why PHP became the favourite dynamic language of the Web. In the last decade, PHP has developed from a niche language for adding dynamic functionality to small websites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale Web systems.

Their list includes software like:

• LINQ for PHP
• Doctrine
• HTML Purifier
• SimpleTest
• Phing
• PHP Security Scanner
• SimplePie
• Smarty

...and many more. Check out the full list for all sorts of useful tools.

There's four tools in the list (links off of his Tools menu):

• PHP lint (a.k.a. syntax check)
• PHP help
• PHP Manual
• JS Lint

On ones like the PHP manual, it's really a link to a browser that opens the right page on the PHP.net website.

• Chris Shiflett's look at the security aspect of the search
• Ilia Alshanetsky's take on the search as it possibly being a hacker's good friend
• Pierre-Alain Joye's searches for macros and the term "virtual_file_ex"
• Harry Fuecks' own search for superglobal-related issues
• Ivo Jansch's happy look into frustrations other developers have had (ex. this search)
• Martin Brotzeller's comments on the new tool

Check out this handy tool and see what you think. Does it provide too much access to code that needs to stay out of hacker's hands? Or does it promote the "open" in open source better than most of the tools out there?

If you've got spare cycles and want to help a brother out, read on. I received this from Leonard Rapoport of the International Press Association, (Disclaimer: Zend is a member of the IPA) The IPA is looking for some help. As you can see from the email below, they need a PHP programmer to help them out on some small projects and know of some larger projects they could turn you on it.

Any interested parties should contact Leonard via email and get things started.

I'm trying to use PHP 5.2 to talk to Skype via the COM extension and Skype4COM interface.

I'm using this example from the Skype Forum, but I get a COM exception of "Skype client is not installed."

He also points to someone else with the problem, but still hasn't quite found a solution. Anyone want to help?

Go and check out Chorizo!'s new Help Center. We extended the existing tutorials and provide a smooth overview about the current documentation. Included is an overview about all the scanner plugins Chorizo! is using and explain a bit what each plugin does.

There are "Getting Started" guides offered, video tutorials, details on each of the plugins (PHPversions, XSS plugin, Session injection, etc), some of the features of the scanner, and some general troubleshooting information.

Main items on the list are:

• General ways to help
• Helping the QA team
• Helping with PEAR
• Helping with the Documentation
• Helping via Perl (extensions)
• Heliping with the PHP Core

Under each of these main points there are several sub-points for even more ideas of places to get involved. It's a great list, and you can get even more information on helping in an area by clicking on its title to be taken to the official page.

Yahoo is Helping Zend with PHP 6, says Andi Gutmans co-founder and vice president of technology at Israeli-based company Zend Technologies, in an interview with Stephen Shankland of c|net news. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

They mention what PHP6 will be and include a link to the (oldish) meeting notes concerning it. Be sure to check out the comments for some interesting questions...