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.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

Padraic Brady has posted part seven of his series on building a blogging application with the Zend Framework as a base. This time he's working on the output of the entries - using Zend_View to standardize the look and feel.

In previous parts we've been using View Helpers without even noticing it. Zend_Form doesn't generate forms by itself, rather it delegates most of the HTML generation to a set of View Helpers like Zend_View_Helper_Form. The problem with such output, is that View Helpers can only generate XHTML 1.0 Strict output if we actually inform them of the standard to use. [...] What we should do, is make the Doctype of our View more dynamic. This is achievable by using the Doctype View Helper.

Padraic talks about the different parts of the View layer in the framework (helpers, partials, placeholders) that were mentioned in previous parts. He shows how to change up his current setup to work with the Doctype View Helper to change the view and make it UTF-8 compliant.

He shows the changes to the bootstrap file, how he's grabbing the entries from the database and how he pushes that out to the view to be displayed. He also creates a custom view helper to create the entry URLs for each of the posts (Wordpress users out there, these are the stubs).

Padraic Brady has posted part eight of his series guiding you through his construction of Zend Framework-based blogging software:

In Part 8 of the ongoing saga describing how to build a real world blog application using the Zend Framework we finally reach the point at which we concentrate on blog entries. At the end of this Part, we will be able to create and edit entries in preparation for Part 9 when we will explore displaying them to the world!

In this part, he shows how to add in the Entry controller with an Add action inside (and what code goes in them). He makes a Zend_Form extended form and throws in some validation, a use of HTMLPurifier and the code to push these entries into your database.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.

The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.

WebReference.com has posted part four (the final installment) of their "Building a Weblog" series today, focusing on creating the categories for the posts, adding a new entry, and updating a current one.

First off is the creation of the categories script - just a simple little page that takes in the category name (from a form) and inserts it into the categories table in the database. The next form functions in basically the same way, but handles more information. It lets you write and save a new blog entry to the database.

Finally, since everyone makes mistakes, they include a sample script to let you update one of your already posted blog entries, using the same kind of form you used to enter it.

WebReference.com is back today with part two of their "Building a Weblog" series picking up where the previous part left off.

They start with adding a comments summary to the page, giving the user a view of the previous comment submitted by other users. They include a brief look at anchor tags before moving into the code to display some of the previous blog entries. Next up is all about getting more specific - creating the code to view each of the specific blog entries.

Of course, what is an entry without its comments, so they include the code to integrate that into the page as well. Finally, they give the user a way to talk back about the content they're reading by adding a simple comments form to each of the posts' pages.

Company	Digital Business Solutions
Location	Louisville, Kentucky
Title	Entry Level PHP Website Programmer
Summary	We are looking for someone with a positive attitude who really loves programming and learning new technologies to become the newest member of our team. This is a full time position. Specific job responsibilities include website and web application development; database and link-integration; website maintenance; and content management tool development.
Link	More Information

As mentioned in this new post on the PHP Magazine website today, the United States Equestrian Federation has made a move on their site to an all PHP-based setup.

The United States Equestrian Federation (USEF) boasts almost 100,000 individual members, holds more than 2,700 member competitions, and has 100 affiliate organizations. All these records are managed in the USEF with PHP programming.

In the original press release it references, they also note that the Show-EZ system, which the horse entry section of the organization's site is based on, has only been around for a little while but has already proved itself invaluable. It even bosts the ability to be used via a Blackberry/Pocket PC/cellphone for the ultimate in mobility during shows.

In his latest blog entry, Robert Peake looks at something that PHP is certainly susceptible to, given that other languages like JSP, ASP, and Ruby are always being compared to it - the popularity of the language. Robert asks "Does Popularity Matter?"

Nexen recently posted a great survey on PHP usage (perhaps they beat NetCraft to the punch this time?). We've seen these trends before: PHP is on the steady rise for numbers of installations. Coupled with Apache, it is the most popular web development platform around.

My question is: does that really matter?

By "matter" I mean, "does it affect PHP's credibility in a positive way?"; and also: "does it prove anything?"

He wonders if the numbers that show on the surveys are PHP usage because people want to use it, or if it's simply that it's preinstalled in so many places these days (and has a low "barrier to entry") that it's being mistaken for popularity. He also mentions something that I think we all, as PHP developers and ambassadors, should think about:

So, rather than the community resting on its collective laurels for one more year of increased installations, I encourage us all to consider what can be done to promote PHP through education, standards, and best practices to its rightful place as much, much more than simply a popular web development language.