Once in a while we see fans of other languages writing long articles on why PHP sucks and you should not use it. But will that ever matter? That is one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 23 of the Lately in PHP podcast, for the first time also recorded in video using Google Hangouts On Air.

They also talk about some of the recent proposals for PHP itself and the buzz surrounding the "HTTP 2.0" protocol that's been proposed. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. Since they used the Google Hangouts to record the session, you can also watch the video.

The PHP development migrated to a Git repository. With the integration with GitHub it became easier for non-core developers to submit pull requests with bug fixes and new feature improvements to PHP. Will this new possibility make it PHP core developers accept more contributions from non-core developers?

The episode also looks forward to the next release in the PHP 5.4.x series (5.4.1) and some of the stir that a recent post (to PHPClasses) about OOP caused in the community.

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

For those that are not yet aware of this probably because they only arrived to the PHPClasses site recently, PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that aims to study what were the last year trends regarding what PHP developers have been searching for.

According to their results, some of the trends ramping up (or still going strong) for 2012 include:

• Social media sites
• Sites like Groupon, Foursquare and Bitcoin
• jQuery plugins
• Doctrine
• MODX
• SugarCRM

The recently published article on attracting talented Web developers by offering remote job positions raised an interesting debate on the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of this way of working. This debate was the main topic of discussion of the episode 18 of the Lately in PHP podcast with Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert, who were joined by César Rodas. César is a top PHPClasses contributor that has been working remotely for several years for companies around the world.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by direct download or by subscribing to their feed.

PHP 5.4 Alpha versions just started to be released. On episode 14 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the purpose and interest of the new PHP 5.4 features already implemented in these alpha releases. They also discuss the repercussion in the PHP community of the plan to deprecate the original PHP MySQL extension.

You can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

On the episode 12 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the latest developments and what is still stalling the progress of the developments needed to make PHP 5.4 happen.

They also have a bit of discussion about which browser is better for development - Chrome or Firefox (and the places Chrome might be lacking). You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 to listen at your convenience.

Given the latest problems that occurred in sites that are based on cloud hosting services, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss if the current breed of cloud services are the right solution to host PHP sites. They also comment on the JavaScript Professionals Directory and the JavaScript jobs board which were recently launched to address the increasing demand of developers from companies that have JavaScript job openings.

You can listen via the in-page player, by downloading the episode or by subscribing to their feed.

On episode 8 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert review the most important happenings of the PHP world in 2010 and what they expect for 2011. They also comment on the latest PHP bug fix releases and discuss why Chrome OS matters to PHP developers and Web application developers in general.

You can either listen to the episode via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly. The full episode is also transcribed in the post.

Since last year, the PHPClasses site started publishing trends about what PHP developers have been looking for in this site. This is an initiative that is repeated every year. It is similar to Google Zeitgeist, except that instead of analyzing Google user searches, it analyzes searches done by PHP developers on this site.

A lot of the results aren't surprising given the current state of things on the web - terms like "andriod", "mongodb", "html5" and "facebook" all make appearances. Manuel looks at a few of the tops results and gets a bit more specific on each, citing a few reasons why visitors might have been searching.