Ben Vinegar, having come from Rails to PHP was missing something - the ActiveSupport functionality Rails had natively that PHP doesn't. So, he's written up his own support for it and shares it in his latest blog post.

One of the things I miss most from Rails is ActiveSupport, the module that modifies Ruby's core classes (numbers, strings, more) with handy utility methods. They tie so well into the language, most Rails developers don't realize they aren't core methods.

He starts with a Ruby example, showing how they work to show things like camelized strings, times and evaluations. Since PHP doesn't support the same syntax, he had to work around it with some "PHP trickery" in PHP5 to handle it similarly. You can check out the results in the examples in his blog or by downloading the library and trying it out for yourself.