• Job Posting: BINC (Recruiter) Seeks PHP Web Developer (East Bay, CA)
• Job Posting: BINC (Recruiter) Seeks Front-end Web Developer (Redwood City, CA)
• Job Posting: Getloaded.com Seeks IT Developer (Midlothian, VA)
• Job Posting: Purewire Seeks PHP Developer (Atlanta, GA)

Mike Bernat is a big fan of XDebug and has posted about why he thinks installing it is the best decision you'll ever make.

I finally got around to installing Xdebug on my development environment and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread. Installation was a breeze and the information it provides when something has gone wrong is incredibly helpful during debugging.

He explains what the software does, how it can help you and your development - even how to get it up and running on your PHP install (seriously, it's drop dead easy...why haven't you installed it yet?). He also points to the tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone introducing the powerful tool.

On the SaniSoft blog Tarique Sani has posted about (and made available for download) some code sniffs for the CakePHP framework. Some problems arose with some of the naming that the framework uses, but with some "tinkering around"...

[It became] apparent that I had to have my own set of Cake sniffs to manage this but a separate standard just for this seemed an over kill and the simplicity of code made it kind of fun to add more standards which I liked but were in different set of sniffs.

You can grab the whole list of sniffs from their downloads. They implemented them as a pre-commit hook on their SVN server even so that developers could not violate the coding standards when they submit their code.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

Doug Brown has posted a new entry to his blog about how the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework has saved him some money.

He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

• Andy Frey's Blog: JavaScript PHP Remoting Demonstration
• Job Posting: Getloaded.com Seeks IT Developer (Midlothian, VA)
• Community News: UNA Editor Screencast - PHP integration
• PHPFreaks.com: PHP Security
• Job Posting: RJ Byrd (Recruiter) Seeks PHP Developer (Dallas, TX)
• DevX.com: Generating Reports and Statistics in PHP
• Site News: Job Postings for the week of 06.22.2008
• Community News: PHPCamp (Pune, India)
• Avent Labs Blog: PHP framework comparison benchmarks
• PHPImpact Blog: From Swift Mailer to Zend_Mail

On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.

Stefan Priebsch recently posted about his struggles with creating a custom coding started with the PHP_CodeSniffer package:

In CodeSniffer, a coding standard is basically represented by an empty class that extends PHP_CodeSniffer_Standards_CodingStandard. I could not get the CodeSniffer to find my coding standard, though, and found the documentation lacking about where to put it, how to name it, and how to refer to it in the --standard switch.

After an email to Greg Sherwood (developer of the package) Stefan figured out his issue and has shared the solution in this post (step by step).

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.