We live in a very exciting time. Never before has education been so cheaply available to the masses (if not free). The medium, itself, has made tectonic shifts from a classroom setting, to blogs, screencasts and complete university classes, as a set of videos and interactive forums. Given these resources, there's absolutely no excuse not to dive in and learn. However, with such a wealth of resources, filtering through the options can often become overwhelming. In this article, I will outline a simple process to kick-start your education.

Among the items in their list there's things like:

• "Let the Information Flow Begin"
• "Listen and Watch"
• "Blogging"
• "Feel the Pulse"
• "Meetups and Conferences"

Each tip comes with a bit of description and some links to other resources and tools that can help you along your way.

Here is a community built list with the top 10 most popular reasons to use Solar Framework, maybe if your not currently using Solar Framework one or two of these items will perk your interest up and get you to take a look.

Mentioned in the list are things like:

• Structure that just makes sense
• Built in easy to use Locale system
• Solar Views based on Savant the best Template system in the Cosmos
• The community, active and tight knit

Check out the full post for the rest of the list.

CMS Match collected data on CMS functionality categories, such as core apps, flexibility, interoperability, mobile internet, performance, security and available support. The available functionalities are scored for each CMS. For example a blog functionality. Scores range from not available (0 points) through limited (5 points) to fully supported (10 points). Based on these scores, CMS Match was able to calculate a top 25.

PHP content management systems included in their list are eZ Publish, Acquia, WordPress and Joomla.

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

George Schlossnagle gave a talk on "High Performance PHP" which was very good. At OmniTI, George works with a lot of different clients helping them resolve bottlenecks and squeeze the most out of their applications. This experience along with the collective knowledge of OmniTI gives him unique insight into ways to speed up PHP applications. I only got to sit in on a small portion of his session but even so, I was able to get some good tips.

Cal opts for more of an overview than a summary (the talk/session was about 3.5 hours long), so he includes the "10 Best Practices" George shared to help the performance of your applications.

Included in the list are:

• Control your include trees to no more than 10 includes
• Be mindful of how you use other network resources
• Output buffering and compression are good.
• Profile early, profile often.

His list includes libraries from all different technologies, not just PHP. Several are Javascript-related, but it's always good to have a complete toolkit on hand when trying to tackle some of the more difficult things.

Included in his list are things like:

• Moo.fx - a Javascript effects library
• Swat - an open source web application toolkit
• PEAR - the PHP package repository
• Mochikit - lightweight Javascript library

Be sure to check out the post and its comments for more great resources!