Phil Sturgeon has reposted an answer he gave in response to this Quroa entry about why people "think PHP sucks".

There are a lot of reasons people "hate" PHP, or at least look down on it. Some of them are founded, some are not, and some of them are circumstantial.

He mentions seven of the reasons people commonly give for not liking PHP:

• "Inconsistent haystack / needle"
• PHP is a HTML file, with logic
• No standards
• Lack of Quality Packages
• Misconception (about the current PHP features)
• You were doing it wrong
• Elitism ("not using PHP is cool")

There's even more discussion happening on the subject in this reddit post with thoughts from both PHP and non-PHP developers.

If you've been looking for a good way to get introduced to the latest version of the Zend Framework but didn't know where to start, you might grab a spot in this upcoming webinar from Zend about the Zend Framework 1.10.

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it's built, and answer your questions about the new release.

The webinar will be happening this coming Wednesday, March 17th, at 9am PST and will be happening via WebEx. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler will be talk about the new features, current functionality that was enhanced and will answer your burning questions. To reserve your spot, head over to the registration page and enter your info.

Following some of his recent experience in finding a new source of employment, Brandon Savage has shared some of the common questions he was given during his search for a PHP development position.

There are a large number of PHPers looking for jobs right now. After having just gone through the process myself, I wanted to put together some of the most common PHP interview questions. These questions are all non-technical, but do represent the soft side of PHP interviewing. I cannot help you if you don't have the technical skills to answer the technical questions, but answering these questions correctly is often the key to making or breaking your chances with an interviewer who otherwise has fine technical candidates.

Questions he was asked included "How did you get into PHP?", "Where do you ultimately want to be in life?" and the more random "How many gas stations are there in Los Angeles?". For each, Brandon recommends a few tips on dealing with them and includes some possible tactics on answering.

As a continuation from his previous post ("How do GOOD developers ask questions?") Mike Bernat is back with this suggestion on how should good developers answer questions.

When given a very specific question that you know has a very specific answer, your first reaction might be to blurt out the answer and be done with it. However, I like to go the extra step and ask what they've tried so far or what research they've done. I like to show them how to arrive at the answer on their own as well as provide the solution.

He suggests that it's more about the thinking behind the answer than just reciting something from memory. Anyone can memorize facts and terms (and solutions, for that matter) but a good developer will be able to explain why he came to that conclusion.

On the Liip blog today Christian Stocker has posted about a few common issues developers seem to have with the upload progress meter extension and a few answers to help them out.

After I released uploadprogress 1.0.0 some days ago and finally declared it as stable, it's time to write that blogpost about some of the limitations and caveats one has to know.

The post links to a demo and answers a few different questions on issues such as:

• Running it on other modules than mod_php on Apache ( like fastcgi)
• Checking if files are too big
• The position and content of UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER within the form is important
• Why not use $_SESSION for the info?
• It segfaults, when I don't include UPLOAD_IDENTIFIER

See the PECL page for the extension for more information.

In this new post to his (newly WordPress-ed) blog Brandon Savage looks at a consideration most developers think of too late and when their applications are already starting to bulge around the edges - scalability. It's the first part of this series.

Before we actually get started hacking on our code, let's make sure we've got the right questions asked and answered. We're going to need some resources, the help of others in our organization, and probably some understanding of the current system structure before we're successful in our goal. Some of these questions may seem mundane, and others will be extremely important. But we must ask and receive answers to all of them, so let's get started.

The questions touch on the topics of bottleneck sources, why scalability of the application is needed and what other services are out there that could do what I need without having to roll my own.

The symfony blog has a few questions and answers posted about their "Practical symfony" book for those inquiring minds out there.

Questions include:

• Should I buy it? (who is it targeted towards)
• Will it get old too soon?
• Should I wait to the new edition of the book?
• Are the contents of the book full color or b&w?
• Should I buy the book or print The definitive guide to symfony 1.2?

The book can be ordered in three versions - Propel (English), Doctrine (English) and Propel (Spanish).

Lukas Smith has written up the FAQ for the emPHPower movement and has posted about them on his blog:

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The FAQ includes answers to lots of questions including:

• How to I get involved?
• What is the target audience?
• Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?
• What is the purpose of the membership fees?
• Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?
• Who decides on what emPHPower does?

Since the first stable version of the Zend Framework has been out for a while now (version 1.0), the Zend Developer Zone is starting up their own way to give back to the project - the The Big Q&A session about all things Zend Framework:

On April 30, 2008, Zend's very own Zend Framework team will make themselves available for a 2-hour Q&A session. You can submit your questions in advance here to give us an opportunity to think them over a bit, or you can surprise us with them during the webinar.

The webinar will be happening On April 30th at 9am PDT and will last about two hours, during which any and all (hopefully) questions about the framework will be answered.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has also posted about it over on his blog.

In a response of sorts to these interview questions posted by Nick Halstead, Matt Wilkin took the next step and worked up the answers for the questions in a new two-part series.

Well at another blog they shared some pre-interview questions from Yahoo for a PHP job. The only problem is they never provided the answers. So that's what I'm going to do now.

Part one answers questions one through eleven and the second part wraps things up with the answers for questions twelve through twenty-two.