Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it's episode 11 when it's actually episode 12, but hey!

They talk about the Apple vs. Android functionality gap, Rackspace's recent issues and the definition of "guiding principles in an open source project". They also mention another PHP community member Brian Deshong who has volunteered to help out with an iPad app for the show.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed (or on iTunes).

Nowadays, phpDocumentor version 2 is probably the best option out there as it has a good architecture, it works fine, it is extensible, and quite a few big PHP projects is already using it. And that's fine. I don't want to compete with it, I don't want to replace it, I'm just open sourcing some code used by Symfony, Twig, and Silex because I'm not comfortable with closed-source software. And to be totally honest and transparent, I have not released the code before because it was not "good enough".

He gives an example of how to install and use Sami - configuring the directories to parse and setting up a custom theme for the resulting generated documentation (using regular CSS and HTML definitions).

As quoted from the LWN review of the book:

Open Advice is a book that will be helpful to those who are new to FOSS, but, because of the individual voices, styles, and tones, it doesn't read like a "how to". It could even be recommended to those who aren't necessarily interested in contributing, but are curious about what this "free software thing" is all about.

It contains real experience from real developers that work on FOSS projects with chapters titled:

• "Code First"
• "University and Community"
• "Love the Unknown"
• "Quality Assurance"
• "Good Manners Matter"
• "Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd"

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA) and can be downloaded in multiple formats - ePub, mobi, PDF and paperback, if you prefer that.

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place. [...] These are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important.

She talks about:

• The importance of fostering a good community around the project
• Providing good documentation (README in this case) for people new to the project
• Having a clear vision of the future of the project (roadmap)
• Dealing with the code contributed to the project - good and bad
• Having transparency with the contributors and anyone wanting to find out more about the project

Want to get involved? Check out Joind.in on github for more details and the source for the site.

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

This non-scientific analysis of the popular and exciting PHP projects starts from researches on active projects on SourceForge and GitHub; the latter is where most of the collaboration and involvement of PHP developers is today. I've also crowdsourced the question on Twitter to catch projects I wasn't aware of, and I hope to do the same with you.

Other projects included in his list are:

• Symfony2 Components
• Moodle
• Composer and Packagist
• Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress

Have a project you think he missed? Let him know!

Code reuse is largely accepted as "best practice" in our industry. Code reuse has many advantages, such as a smaller code-base which is easier to grok for developers. It's easier to maintain and optimize, since you can make less changes in order to achieve the desired results. Many modern techniques and tools were created in order to better reuse and modularize code. But while we're reusing code, we're duplicating effort. The same code is being written over and over in different places, wasting time and money.

He suggests that custom development should always be a last resort for software development, that there's plenty of other (open source) software out there that meets many of the needs businesses have. In his opinion, component-based development is the future of the industry - pieces that fit together with common interfaces and are larger than the sum of their parts. He sees a "commercial open source" model emerging from the current state of things. This model could result in more well maintained OS projects and more functionality being released as a part of it.

What we have currently is increasing noise, as more and more people have easier access to start programming and publishing their projects. We need to streamline the process and add that missing financial element that makes it sustainable and repeatable.

Yes, there are many CMS available for your website, most of them are Open Source. You can not only use them but may modify too according to your need but under GNU license. [...] Now move on to other PHP Based Open Source CMS, following list shows you 30 Open Source CMS besides WordPress which can be useful to build your website and manage your content.

Other content management systems that made their list include:

• Pluck
• Active CMS
• Automne
• concrete5
• Diem
• Dynamix

Each one on the list comes with a brief description of what it offers and where it comes from.

The PHPBuilder staff was saddened to learn that the founder of our site, Tim Perdue, passed away on September 16 , 2011, after a battle with cancer. At only 37 years of age, Tim's passing came much too soon, but his contributions to the PHP and open source communities assure him a lasting legacy.

Related posts include this tribute from his company, GForge and this article from Jake Ludington on LockerGnome. Digging through our own archives, I found this interview with him back in 2002 (an archive.org link, the original is no longer there).

OpenSource is an amazing phenomena, but how safe open-source projects are? Would commercial project be safer over the community-supported project? Frameworks can't exist without their core team and In this article I look at how different PHP frameworks are supporting their core developers.

He talks briefly about the need for a good, solid group of core developers on a framework (or really any product) to provide a stable foundation if a product was created with it. Four projects are mentioned - Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Agile Toolkit - and why, because of the backing they have from a company and a large group of developers (and contributors) they're not "yet another framework" that'll disappear over time.

Making new frameworks is fun, however, if you share framework with others, be responsible about the support. Make realistic goals and try to have a plan for a next few years. If you are the author, think who will support the community when you decide to move on.