So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block. "* Created 04/16/1998" Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project.

The current version of Phorum is 5.2 stable and can be downloaded directly from their site.

• Thou shalt obey the Release Master.
• Thou shalt not forget to add comments to thy code, especially if the code is tricky.
• Thou shalt not fix a bug only in one of the branches unless it did not exist in the others.
• Thou shalt discuss all new features in internals@.

IMO it's time to make the development process more organized. This is my version of what I would like to see as an official set of rules for PHP community.

I'm announcing the "10 Days of free Dessert!". This basically means that I'll post at least 1 useful and easy to adapt CakePHP tip begining tomorrow for the next 10 days. I will try to pick things you might not have heard before and that didn't get a lot of loving from the docs team so far.

Here's the listing so far:

• The 7 Crucials of CRUD
• Become Friends with the Inflector
• Generate a Random Password
• Keep Your Cake Fresh (use SVN HEAD)
• Keep a Custom Configuration File
• MySQL & UTF-8
• Conventions over Ego
• Render Custom Errors
• Graceful Error Handling
• Default Models, Components, and Helpers
• Welcome back, Friendly URLs
• Debugging requestAction
• A Simple Config Model The New XML Class

The suggestions include things like:

• Enabling compression of HTML with the output_handler settings in your php.ini
• Move from file-based sessions to shared memory sessions
• Use output buffering
• Don't use images when text will do

Some of the suggestions are just general web development items (such as that last one), but some web developers out there need to be reminded of them. There are still too many image only sites out there...

PHP frameworks are the latest hot topic in the PHP community, and new frameworks are being released daily. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers different functionality.

In this article we will look at ten popular frameworks, and compare them to each other. First I will give you a general chart which gives you a quick overview of all the frameworks, and after that we'll go through each framework and discuss it in short.

They start with the chart mentioned above for those that just want to boiled down version of the reviews. From there, they work through each, describing general details about them and the general feel that the author got from them as they developed in them. Of course, there is no real "winner" when it comes to this kind thing. Sure, there's always a few that rise to the top as more well developed and suited for more of the projects out there, but it's really more about what fits for you, not an overarching single framework to do it all...]]> Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:27:00 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4784 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4784 mustapha has posted his Top 10 list for his opinions on PHP frameworks.

Development of PHP scripts without a preconceived plan to manage them is asking for a headache. The goal of a framework is to make the process of writing web-based applications simpler.

An application designed around MVC is easier to manage because it is split into tiers, which allow for independent development. This promotes code reusability by building models, which are reusable throughout the application.

His list includes frameworks like Phrame, Symfony, and CakePHP ranked according to his personal tastes. He does provide some backing behind his top three choices, however - giving his reason(s) for picking them.]]> Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:10:10 -0600