In the latest episode of the "Cloud Out Loud" podcast, Elizabeth Naramore interviews Ed Finkler, most recently known for his MicroPHP Manifesto.

Our own Elizabeth Naramore interviews Ed Finkler, author of the MicroPHP Manifesto.

• The MicroPHP Manifesto
• What was the inspiration for it?
• Let's talk about the controversy around it - where do you think that came from?
• What do you think the impact of the Manifesto has made on the community? Do you think it's given cause to people to rethink their own assumptions?

To listen you can either download the episode (mp3 or ogg) or subscribe to their feed via RSS or iTunes.

On Reddit.com there's a good discussion going on to answer the question "What non-PHP stuff should a PHP developer know?"

I was looking at job description for a web developer, and one of the big responsibilities was database maintenance. [...] And along those lines, what other skills would be useful for a PHP developer to have that aren't directly PHP-based?

Suggestions so far include things like:

• Linux command-line skills
• some Python
• Virtualization (making and administering VMs)
• Version control systems (svn or git)
• Database architecture
• HTML/CSS/Javascript

If you're a fan of open source development and can't get enough about projects and what's the latest in the online OS community as a whole, you'll definitely enjoy The Changelog (it's a weekly podcast and news site).

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

• Etsy Code as Craft: Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP in 2012
• Chris Hartjes' Blog: How Not to Suck at PHP
• PHP.net: PHP 5.3.10 Released (Security Fix - Recommended Upgrade)
• Henrik Bjørnskov's Blog: Symfony2: Using the validator symfony1 style
• Freek Lijten's Blog: Currently on PHP's internals - Property Accessors
• PHPMaster.com: Tracking Upload Progress with PHP and JavaScript
• PHPClasses.org: Another Serious Security Bug on PHP 5.3.9
• Mayflower Blog: Zend Framework Application.ini Cheat Sheet
• Artur Ejsmont's Blog: How to build mongodb pecl extension in 32bit for PHP 5.2 on OSX Snow Leaopard
• Developer Drive: Building a PHP Ad Tracker: Data Object Design and Coding

On the LeaseWeb Labs blog there's a continuation from a previous post about migrating your Symfony1 application over to Symfony2. In the first part of this series of posts, Stefan Koopmanschap talked about wrapping your code to make it work. In this second post, Maurtis van der Schee tackles two issues Stefan mentioned - performance problems and handling authorization/authentication.

On December 21, 2011 Stefan Koopmanschap wrote an excellent article on this blog titled "Painless (well, less painful) migration to Symfony2." [...] We were very much inspired by his passionate elucidation and we were fully convinced of the urge to start migrating to Symfony2 as soon as possible. However, he also provided us with a "A word of caution" about 2 things: performance and authentication/authorization. This might get some people worried, but not us: it challenged us to find a solution for those two open issues.

They explain why these two things are a problem and some of their solutions they've created - a .htaccess for routing and manually replicating the Symfony2 session in the Symfony1 code. Included in the post are the rewrite rules and code to make these two things happen (and a small configuration change to make them work).

On SitePoint.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to create a random number generator in PHP (with the help of methods like mt_rand and mt_srand).

Computers cannot generate random numbers. A machine which works in ones and zeros is unable to magically invent its own stream of random data. However, computers can implement mathematical algorithms which produce pseudo-random numbers. They look like random numbers. They feel like random distributions. But they're fake; the same sequence of digits is generated if you run the algorithm twice.

Included in the post is code showing how to use the random functions and how to create a class (Random) that provides a few methods to help make generation easier - "seed" and "num". It first calls "seed" with a number to start the random generator off with and then "num" in a loop to pull out random values based on that.

On the Refulz.com blog there's a recent post introducing the __toString() magic method in PHP. This handy method allows you to define how to return an object when it's referenced as a string.

We started the study of PHP magic methods by learning about __get() magic method. [...] PHP is loosely typed language and same variable can be used or referred as string, number or object. The __toString() method is called when the code attempts to treat an object like a string. This function does not accept any arguments and should return a string.

Some quick code is included showing how it works - returning a combined string made from two private class properties when the object ($obj) is echoed out. They also show multiple ways of using the method in both pre- and post-PHP 5.2.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial about using a feature in the upcoming PHP release (5.4) to make it easier to work with more modular code - using traits.

In this article I will discuss traits, a new feature introduced in PHP 5.4 to overcome [issues where multiple inheritance is needed]. The concept of traits itself is nothing new to programming and is used in other languages like Scala and Perl. They allows us to horizontally reuse code across independent classes in different class hierarchies.

Included in the post is example code showing what the use of a trait looks like and a method for creating a Singleton that can spawn instances of two classes. Also included are examples of:

• using multiple traits at once,
• traits made up of traits,
• the importance of order,
• aliasing to avoid conflicts,
• reflection
• and a few other features that come along with their use.

• Zend Developer Zone: ZendCon Sessions Episode 037: Why MVC is not an Application Architecture
• Michael Nitschinger's Blog: Understanding the Lithium Router - Part 1
• Rafael Dohms' Blog: Problem Solving technique #1: Taking a mental break
• ZendCasts.com: Unit Testing Doctrine 2 Entities
• Lorna Mitchell's Blog: Installing Gearman for PHP and Ubuntu
• Label Media Blog: Design Patterns in PHP - Observer Pattern
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: PHP Project Wizard
• Lorna Mitchell's Blog: Book Review: The Passionate Programmer
• Jim Plush's Blog: How to Auto Create Issues in Jira From PHP
• Query7.com: Developing A Blog With CakePHP
• AppStorm.net: Using PyroCMS to Manage Content With Simplicity
• TechZinger Blog: Fat-Free Framework for PHP
• Zend Developer Zone: Creating Multi-Language Web Applications with Zend_Translate
• MySQL Performance Blog: Sample datasets for benchmarking and testing
• PHPBuilder.com: Top 10 phpMyAdmin Tips and Tricks You May Not Know

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest in their DPC Radio series of podcasts as recorded at last year's Dutch PHP Conference. In this new episode they share Lorna Mitchell's talk "Implementing OAuth".

With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can follow along with the presentation in her slides.