ome developers develop because it pays the bills. They don't want to be part of the community, they have other passions. I am ok with that, I don't want anyone involved who doesn't want to be. Other developers however tell me they didn't know the community existed, they don't know how to get involved or they are just too shy to step up. It is to this second group (and anyone who is already involved but wants more) that I want to talk to. If you want to get involved in the PHP community here are 5 quick ideas to get you going.

His five things are simple and cover a lot of different media, from blogs to twitter:

• Email your local PHP User Group and offer to speak.
• Setup a PHP tag on your blog.
• Submit something to DevZone!
• Re-tweet something about PHP.
• Find at least one other PHP developer that is not involved in the PHP community and convince them to read this list and take action.

He equates this last one to a "chain letter" but it's key to helping th community grow. It's all about people getting together around a language they love and sharing that with more and more people.

There are very few tutorials on how to build templates. There are two books and a handful of other resources scattered around the web. So, we set out to build the very best template class we could. Here are first five sessions of the class: Joomla templates are not rocket science. You can learn how to build and modify them. We can show you how. Interested?

They break it up into the basic parts:

• Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Index.php
• CSS/Cascading Style Sheets
• Images
• Security

If you've written a PEAR package, it's probably a good idea to submit some end user documentation. Here's how to do it.

He explains what it is (XML in CVS, easily convertible with phpd) and how the process flows - save the current docs, add your own, build locally and submit to CVS. Here's his tips to help things go smoothly/turn out better:

• Gather the prerequisites
• Save current documentation
• Try building the docs
• Write your own XML docs
• ReBuild peardoc
• Commit your XML
• (There is no seventh step - you're done!)

The administration area of a Web application is a favorite target of hackers and thus particularly well protected. The same goes for WordPress: when creating a blog, the system creates an administrative user with a perfectly secure password and blocks public access to the settings area with a log-in page. This is the cornerstone of its protection. Let's dig deeper!

Here's their ten tips:

• Rename and Upload the wordpress Folder
• Extend the file wp-config.php
• Move the wp-config.php file
• Protect the wp-config.php file
• Delete the admin User Account
• Choose strong passwords
• Protect the wp-admin Directory
• Suppress Error Feedback on the Log-In Page
• Restrict Erroneous Log-In Attempts
• Keep Software Up to Date

Adding an RSS feed to your site is quick and painless, and can be done with pure PHP (and some kind of data source). After the jump, 3 simple steps to building an RSS feed in php.

The steps are pretty simple - figure out what content you want to serve, set up the basic RSS XML structure, and loop through your data to push it in to the template and echoed out. Some simple example code is included.

I wrote this tutorial a while back and figured it would be good to post because suPHP is growing more popular as an alternative to phpSuExec. The instructions assume that you are on a Linux cPanel server and are familiar with how to install PHP, but do not want to use EasyApache's suPHP installer in WHM.

It's a long process but a lot of it is just configuration changes and grabbing the right software. Every line of each of the config files you'll need to change is there ready to cut and paste into your files as well as the command line calls you'll need to make to configure/compile and move files to where they need to go.

The Zend Platform Job Queue is used to make applications more responsive by allowing tasks to be performed on other machines (e.g.: dedicated machine), and scheduling tasks to a future time (usually to low-traffic hours). [...] Job Queue offers both a web-based management UI, and a programmer-oriented rich API, which allows embedding sophisticated logic into applications. This article will demonstrate basic usage of Job Queue, through an imaginary company wesellalot.com.

They start by presenting a scenario where a simple cluster of machines behind a load balancer all work with the same database. Because of some of the tasks they want to perform, things could get overloaded very easily under a high load. Enter the Job Queue and their four step process to integrate it into this setup:

• Step 1: Off Load to a Dedicated Server
• Step 2: Scheduling to low-traffic hours
• Step 3: Breaking down tasks using dependencies
• Step 4: A recurring cleanup job

They also include an explanation as to why this method is preferable over just using croned scripts for the same purpose.

The test suite can't test everything. You should test your applications with your new PHP too. This gives load and real-life testing not possible with PHP's script based test suite.

[...] The tests in ext/oci8/tests verify the behavior of the OCI8 extension. To run them follow these steps.

There's four steps he gives that will help you check your Oracle compile installation including what the response of the test results will look like.

I promised to investigate the steps needed to set up DokuWiki with the simplest authentication scheme for a friend and I thought others might benefit from it too, so here it is.

There's about fifteen steps in all, including the download/install of the package and creating the basic functionality (like a simple Auth schema - he gives an example). Create the superuser and set up the desired restrictions and you're home free. If you want more information on authentication in DokuWiki, check out this page on the DokuWiki's wiki.

I already had a working Eclipse installation that I had used to try out PHPeclipse for Eclipse (not to be confused with the PHP IDE), so I didn't want to bother downloading a brand new full package of Eclipse that includes the PHP IDE and all its requirements. So, I set about on a tedious journey to figure out how to install PHP IDE using the Eclipse Update Manager. These are my notes.

There's really only three main steps he went through: disable PHPeclipse (if installed), install the other software needed by PHP IDE, and finally, install the PHP IDE plugin itself. That's it (assuming all goes well with the prerequisites).

You can grab the latest copy of the Eclipse PHP IDE from the project's website.