• Elizabeth Smith's Blog: Xdebug, Thread Safety, and PHP 5.3
• Davey Shafik's Blog: PHP IDEs (Comparison)
• Robert Basic's Blog: Wordpress as CMS tutorial
• Frank Wu's Blog: Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter
• Matt Curry's Blog: 8 Ways to Speed Up CakePHP Apps
• NETTUTS.com: How to Build a Super Duper News Scroller
• Ant Phillips' Blog: Integrating SAP NetWeaver in Zero PHP
• Rob Allen's Blog: UTF8, PHP and MySQL
• PHPBuilder.com: Building a time-tracking and billing application with Adobe AIR and PHP
• Jamie Hammett's Blog: Open ID edit one page on Wordpress
• Federico Cargnelutti's Blog: Domain-Driven Design (Series)
• PHP in Action: Real programming with PHP 5.3 (part 1): array processing
• Blue Parabola Blog: Coding Standard Analysis using PHP_CodeSniffer
• Quinton Parker's Blog: Try-catch suppress?
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: Quality Assurance Tools for PHP

On the P'unk Avenue blog there's a recent post from Tom Boutell looking at optimizing PHP applications and how you can cope with the possibility of "Serious Traffic" that might come your way.

PHP is easy...as programming languages go, that is. You can build sites in a real hurry. [...] Still, sooner or later success catches up with you and you want your site to cope with Serious Traffic...or cope with moderate traffic on a cheap virtual machine...or at the very least, not be dog-slow with just a handful of users on the system.

He mentions things that can slow down the application (like timeouts on web server connections or not optimizing the site with a "thin" server for non-PHP requests). He mentions the alternative PHP cache (APC) as one possible way to help, some tips on making your Apache server more efficient and pushing those lighter requests off to a smaller, built-for-speed server using FastCGI.

Recently on his blog Jack Diederich took a look at three different interpreters for Ruby, PHP and Python to see how they were implemented as compared to the language they're used in.

The other day I went poking around the Ruby and PHP interpreters (the current stable versions). I hadn't looked inside PHP since the 4.x series and Ruby I had never checked out. Like CPython the internals of both PHP and Ruby look something like their resulting language, but in C. For each interpreter I just compiled it and looked at how core types and extension types were implemented.

For PHP, he went with the PHP 5.2.13 release and talks about the compile process (a bit spammy), running the unit tests that come included and how the interpreter handles data types, core types and objects.

On Kovshenin.com there's a recent post looking at the whole development lifecycle of web-based applications, breaking it out into the three main steps - development, testing and production (splitting out some of these into other, smaller groupings).

Since January this year I've been working on a few projects with a team of over 5 people and high-demanding standards. This raised the problem of project managing and a completely different view of the web development cycle. In this article I'd like to outline the major steps of the software development cycle and how they could be applied to the web development business.

Along with the main three categories (dev, test and production) he also gets a bit more fine grained with things like:

• Development: Pre-alpha Stage
• Development: Beta Stage
• Testing: Release Candidate
• Production: General Availability

On the Joomla community site there's a recent post made of a video from the Joomla Day conference in Australia about creating a Joomla template from scratch. The presenter is Norm Douglas.

Norm Douglas recently presented about how to create a Joomla template from scratch at the Joomla Day in Melbourne, Australia, on 13 February 2010. This is a very informative 77 minute presentation and also covers using the Firebug Firefox addon, code editors and much more.

He covers some simple tools you get you started, the basics of HTML to create a sample layout and looks at CSS definitions that can make the layout look a bit better. Firebug (the plugin for Firefox) helps make locating the different parts of the page easier with a highlighting feature.

Marc Plotz has written up a new tutorial for PHPBuilder.com introducing a simple way to get started combining PHP and Ajax with a "Google Suggest" type of example.

When you use Ajax with PHP, PHP does the calculations that it needs to do on the server and sends the result back to the page. You then use JavaScript to display these results in a predefined place. The demo application you will learn how to build in this article is a very simple Suggestion box, just like the one that Google made famous and thus ushered in the Ajax era.

The example (you can download it here) creates a basic form text field and the Javascript you'll need to make the callback to the waiting PHP script. It doesn't use any external libraries (like jQuery or Prototype) so be ready for bare-bones Javascript.

php|architect has published the latest episode in their "oddWeek" podcast series today - episode 5 with an interview with Matthew Turland.

This week we talk with Blue Parabola Alumni Matthew Turland about the awesomeness that is Phergie [an IRC bot developed in PHP].

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - you can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to the php|architect feed to get this and other great news and articles from the site.

On of the frameworks rising up through the ranks is Lithium (created by some of the original CakePHP developers). In his latest post Chris Hartjes looks at the framework and a particularly useful feature it includes - filters.

As far as I can tell, Lithium is trying it's hardest to be fast, lightweight, and use all the features that PHP 5.3 has to offer. [...] I want to talk about something that I feel is a very underrated part of Lithium, the ability to define filters. This is a concept that you find in Aspect-oriented programming, and one that I imagine most programmers have never considered. Here's why I think it's a big deal.

The filters in Lithium allow you to use code from other classes without having to actually extend them. As Nate Abele says in one of the comments on the post:

While not having to extend classes or dig inside core functionality is certainly pretty central, the way I've been explaining it is that it's important because classes no longer need to know anything about each other in order to be integrated.

You can find out more about the Lithium project (and RAD-Dev) on the project's wiki.

In a new post today Raphael Stolt shows you how to use MongoHq, a cloud-based hosting service, to host a Zend Framework application that uses the MongoDb as a backend. The tutorial focuses on the bootstrapping process to make the framework play nicely with its hosting environment.

Since [MongoHq] went live a few weeks ago I signed up for the small plan and started to successfully re-thinker with it in an exploratory Zend Framework based application. [...] Therefore the following post will show how to bootstrap such an instance into a Zend Framework based application and how to use it from there in some simple scenarios like storing data coming from a Zend_Form into a designated collection and vice versa fetching it from there.

He shows how to create a new resource to make the MongoDb connection available through the entire application, to be used as needed. The resource creates the MongoDb connection based on the options from the config file and catches any exceptions that might happen along the way. As mentioned, he also includes a Zend_Form example that stores some proposal information in a collection in the database.

In the latest post to his blog Brian Swan hows how to interface PHP with "Dallas", a newly introduced technology from Microsoft that lets developers and users of the Azure platform share data with REST-based APIs.

Given that MIX10 is happening this week and that Microsoft Codename "Dallas" (CTP2) was just released, I thought it would be appropriate to look at how to consume "Dallas" data with PHP. [...] In this post I'll build a simple web page that displays some of the free "Dallas" data. And, I must say, I was really surprised at how simple and easy this entire process was.

The system shares out data sets (a list is here) including things like feeds from the Associated Press, InfoUSA, NASA, NAVTEQ and quite a few others. Brian includes screenshots on how to sign up for a data feed, some PHP that can be used to connect to it (just a REST request) and a simple web page that can output the results.