Roshan Bhattarai has set up an informal poll in an entry on his site asking visitors to rate what they think the "best" PHP framework is.

I've been asked a lot of times which is the best PHP framework. Well, it's a very difficult question to answer this question and there are some pros and corns in each framework. So, today I would to hear your views via poll.

Included in the list are CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter. Coming out with around forty-three percent of the votes, though, is the Zend Framework with CakePHP following with twenty-two percent.

If you're looking for a good PHP resource, check out this list from Top-books.org - a listing of PHP and web-related books ranked by their Amazon ranking.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)

and many more....check out the full listing to find a good one on your chosen topic.

The this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, Matthew Weir O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny wil be presenting a "Best Practices" session, which Matthew talks a bit about in his latest blog entry.

We had so much fun presenting during last year's conference, we thought we'd do it again. The session is a pre-conference tutorial session, running for 3 hours on Monday morning, 30 October 2006.

The session will be divided up into two different main sections - programming practices and tools and processes. Each of these have their subsections, including test drive development/unit testing, project documentation, and collaboration tips and tools.

Kore Nordmann has posted about the talks from the PHPWeekender event being posted online.

The talks followed three topics:

• Best Practices - security, performance up to basic OOP features in PHP and debugging
• Object-oriented programming - "OO Candy store"
• and the ever-popular "Enterprise PHP"

You can check out the slides and information for each of the talks on Kore's own page listing them out (as well as some other great talks from other conferences).

Leendert Brouwer has come up with a list of PHP applications that he considers some of the best out there and combined them all in a list over on his blog.

Even though a lot of crap applications have been written in PHP, some applications really shine in excellence. Not only are they very usable, they are also coded well, secure, and well-documented. I've compiled a list of applications for a number of genres that stand out in my opinion.

Included in his list are applications like:

• phpMyAdmin for database administration
• JpGraph for graphing and statistics
• Smarty for templating
• Drupal for community and content management

Packt Publishing has announced a new contest today looking for the "Best Open Source Content Management System" out there (for 2006):

Packt Publishing is currently looking for people to nominate their favourite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/award. The five projects that receive the most public nominations will go through to a final round of voting, with a panel of judges and votes from users deciding who receives the $5,000 prize.

The award will be voted on by a panel of judges and visitors to Packtpub.com and is designed to "recognize and reward outstanding achievement in a high quality and highly competitive marketplace".

For complete information, check out their official page for the contest.

It's always good to finish a rather large project, and Robert Peake shares his joy in this new post on his blog nothing that not only is the project off and running, but it was all created based on a best practices/standards-based approach with respect to PHP development.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

Scott Johnson has created and posted another in his podcast series today, this time, he looks not at the development side of PHP - the actual code - but at the theory behind its development and best practices.

At the request of a listener to past podcasts, Scott created this one to share some of his experiences and findings along the path of his develoopment. Some of the items covered in the podcast include:

• package and library management
• naming conventions
• the seperation of UI and business logic
• code distribution
• using test harnesses

You can download the MP3 of the podcast directly from here.

Tobias Schlitt has two new posts today related to his time spent at this year's FrOSCon in Germany. He mentions some about the conference and about the talk that he gave, "PHP Best Practices".

The first post notes that his slides for the "PHP Best Practices" talk have been posted on the php.net talks page. The talk looked at how to "behave" when working on a project in PHP by following some general guidelines, security issues and common problem guides, and keeping an eye on performance.

The second post is more of an overview of the conference, mentioning what a success it was - well-organized, good talks, plenty of help, good equipment, and great catering for speakers/helpers. The "flow" of the PHP room seemed to go well (from his comments), with only the hackaton being a bit lacking.

Congrats to all involved with this year's FrOSCon! Here's to hoping for even better times at the next conference...

In his blog, Ian Kallen has posted some opinions on the current state of PHP application development and some ways that he'd define best practices to help it.

I've annoyed PHP enthusiasts, friends and colleagues alike, with my distaste for PHP. There's nothing intrinsically bad, buggy or poorly performing about PHP per se. It's real simple: a lot of PHP code that I've had to pick up the hood on is a mess and is susceptible to worlds of instability and bugs.

I'm confident that I or someone else could eventually derive a tool set that meets a rigorous standard for maintainable code. What concerns me are the prevalent practices and establishing best practices. I want to work with the someone else to establish them.

Among his suggestions are included things like "use clear APIs in classes" and "use frameworks to encourage separation of concerns". He also suggests a more wide use of unit testing in PHP to help rid your apps of common issues...