Jonathan Snook points out a new take on working with tags on a site - a focus cloud.

With this fairly broad classification I set about working out exactly what a Focus Cloud should show. To me the name could only suggest one thing. It shows the area which currently is receiving the most Focus! [...] So a Focus Cloud should show not what has been the most popular tags overall, but what is the most popular tags at present. What is your current focus.

The post not only includes the theory behind these focus clouds but also has some PHP code to back it up (using the del.icio.us interface and tags as the foundation of the cloud's contents). The full code for the cloud can be grabbed here.

Jacob Santos has started a series of posts to his blog that focuses on the use of the opcode cache and language features in your applications.

The posts will be researched and go through multiple drafts for professionalism before posting. In this hope, it will strive to enable discussion that isn't flaming and collective of the topic at hand. For as much as I can achieve at my level of writing skill and researching the topic at hand.

He he goes through the purpose of the posts, the areas he's going to focus on, some about the theory that will be used, and the implementation and documentation he'll provide through the series.

In his latest blog post, Jackson Miller asks the question "Is PHP in trouble?"

I like PHP, I really do. PHP5 is a great language and was a huge step in the right direction, unfortunately the community doesn't agree. It is not that the PHP community thinks PHP5 is bad, it is just that they don't agree on anything really. I am starting to wonder if the lack of cohesion is going to bring real trouble to success of PHP as a language.

Though he admits to no longer writing PHP, he's still interested to see it succeed. He just doesn't see the structure the language/community needs to make this happen and make the languagde advance. Jackson also comments on the fact that there doesn't seem to be one "solid" framework for the language, and that even the Zend offering seems on shaky ground.

He also looks at the "downward spiral" things started taking around the time PHP5 was just coming into view - arguing over petty issues, delays of releases, features being added and removed.

The luster was tarnished and the community hasn't recovered. I hope I am wrong, but it looks like it is not going to improve anytime soon.