In this new post to his blog Chris Hartjes mentions a "nifty little feature" that the latest version of the CakePHP framework has - dynamic models.

By default now, Cake will automatically use the AppModel class and create a unique alias to a database table if it does not find the file. This means that if you have a table that follows the Cake conventions, needs no validation, and has no associations to other tables, you don't even have to create the model file any more. Woah, talk about a serious time saver in some cases.

He also mentions a gotcha to keep an eye out for - misspelling the model name when you use it. It'll definitely break things. You can find out more about models in CakePHP from this section in their manual, The Cookbook.

As anyone that's worked with a programming language for a long time knows, you get to know the ins and outs of it pretty well. You get a good feel for how it all works and how feel confident in your skills with it. But what happens if you decide to move on and leave the relationship? Check out this take on just such a situation from the Yet Another Web Development Blog.

We've been together for about five years now. I've had a lot of good times and I've really enjoyed being with you. However, the more we work together, the more concerned I get about our future. I'm sorry, but you don't have the elegance that inspires me to want marry you. I think it's time we broke up.

Some of the reasons given for moving on is PHP's seeming identity crisis, consistency in function names/functionality, and performance issues that were just too much.

Despite being a bit anti-PHP, it's still a well-written piece. Check it out...

There are some PHP developers out there that see PHP as a sort of constant "work in progress" with issues all around - confusing function names, non-intuitive features, and more. So, a group has been formed to help clean things up a bit - the ogoproject.

The ogo project aims to clean up PHP, starting with fixing the inconsistent (and difficult to remember) function names. PHP needs clear naming conventions, and it needs to stick to them. We will offer a temporary fork until function name changes are agreed on, and sensible backwards and forwards compatibility is in place. Then we can get our changes merged into the main branch.

They've already posted some suggestions for a few things, including conventions they're looking to follow and a list of new function names changed according to these new conventions. There's also a downloads and forum section that will soon have content.

If you're interested in getting involved, stop by the #ogoproject channel on the Freenode IRC network and see what's going on.

Keeping with convention - well, naming convention - is a good thing sometimes. Demian Turner thinks so and talks about one of many reasons he sees to follow a standard set in place for a while now - the PEAR naming standard.

By far the most convincing reason to use the file naming convention, which means that a class located in your include path like Foo/Bar/Baz.php is called Foo_Bar_Baz, is the ability to take advantage of PHP 5's __autoload magic method.

The __autoload functionality in PHP 5 is definitely one of the most handy, elegant single lines of code out there and I'd definitely vote for anything that will make working with it even easier. Demian also includes a few lines of example code to show the interaction between the function and the files with the naming convention.

For those that couldn't attend this year's New York PHP Conference that happened back in June, this new 'review' of the conference from Timothy Boronczyk might give you a glimpse into the goings on there.

I attended the New York PHP Conference held in New York City, June 12 - June 16, 2006. Pre-conference training sessions were schedule for the first two days and the remaining days were for the conference itself.

Timothy covers the parts of the conference he was able to attend, including a beginner's PHP class (by Jeff Siegel), a two-day overview of the language and plenty of examples to back that knowledge up. Once the conference began, he moved to a class from Jay Pipes, "Maximum Velocity MySQL". Other talks he also attended included "PHP Rocking in the Windows World", "Quercus: A 100% Clean Room Implementation of PHP in Java", "Metaprogramming with PHP".

For his opinions on all of these talks (and more), check out the full review on the Codewalkers.com site.