In an effort to breathe as much life into an old bit of software he was having to update, Harry Roberts worked up a list of things that he sees can make things a bit more "programmer friendly" when it comes to using classes, methods and interfaces in your code.

His list of four is:

• Doc Comments
• Flexible Parameters
• Use method Entry contracts
• Be Stateful and Refactor

The "Doc Comments" is pretty obvious, but some of the others need a bit more explaining. Being flexible with your parameters is more about requiring the least from a developer, "entry contracts" being the restrictions to let the developer know what you're expecting and refactoring commonly used functionality into a easy, single point of contact.

The Nettuts site has posted a detailed guide to the "comments.php" file that comes with every release of WordPress:

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it's no wonder with it's ease of use and ease of customization. In this tutorial, I'll be dissecting the default WordPress theme's comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier.

The guide breaks down the major parts of the file - some of the general code, how it displays comments, the comment submission form and some "little tricks" it does to handle things like comment numbers, links and the alternating colors.

With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.

With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.

Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.

On the Venture Skills Blog, there's a new post that looks at one of the more recent advancements in keeping the spammers away from your blogs comments (one among many other uses) - re-captchas.

Commonly CAPTCHA is a visual image where the user is asked to type the word they see (or hear) however some provide a logic puzzle [...] Re-captcha works by asking the user for two words instead of the normal one, one word is known to the system and is the actual CAPTCHA the second is an unknown word, if the user gets the CAPTCHA then the users "guess" for the unknown word is recorded, over time a word is given a probability score and when high enough becomes a known word.

They Also include links to re-captcha modules for two of the popular CMS/blogging tools - WordPress and Drupal - to make integration easy.