In this new post to reddit.com the question is posed, "is it better to be an expert or all-arounder in web development?"

Is it better to be an Expert in a framework like Zend (a certified Zend Developer) or know a little bit about everything. [...] In sum, it's just taking too much time for me to master Drupal, Magento, and other popular CMS/Frameworks. So I'm wondering if I should just specialize is one framework/CMS.

Most of the comments follow along the same idea - it's good to be an "all-arounder" and know several different technologies, but it's also good to be an expert (or as close as you can) in one or more technologies. As one comment puts it:

In my experience, it's best to have a specialty, but not have a too narrow focus. There's a lot going into a web site - programming, design, usability, marketing, economy, etc. Understanding a number of those fields makes it easier to work with other people.

The PEAR Blog has posted a request for ideas to help work up a new developer FAQ they can hand out to potential PEAR developers as a "jumpstart" guide to working with the package repository.

New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.

They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll on their site today. The question of the week this time was "which of the following is your favorite category of PHP functionality?"

Among the options, there was "General PHP", "PHP Design", "PHP & XML" and "PHP Security". The one that came out on top, however, was "PHP & Databases" with 26.4% of the vote. Next in line was tied up between two options - "General PHP" and "PHP & Business/Ingegration" both with 15.3% of the votes.

Be sure anc check out (and vote on) their new poll for the week asking readers what they think is the biggest advantage of making to move to PHP5 for their scripts.

Sometimes, all someone needs is a path to follow when they're looking to help out a project. That's why Ligaya Turmelle has posted this great list of ways that you can help out PHP and its surrounding projects (like PEAR).

Main items on the list are:

• General ways to help
• Helping the QA team
• Helping with PEAR
• Helping with the Documentation
• Helping via Perl (extensions)
• Heliping with the PHP Core

Under each of these main points there are several sub-points for even more ideas of places to get involved. It's a great list, and you can get even more information on helping in an area by clicking on its title to be taken to the official page.

June has started, and with that comes some finishing touches for the alpha release of PHP-GTK 2.

• A few class implementations were completed
• PHP-GTK 2 was made PHP 5.2 ready
• A fix for the Win32 crash has been identified
• More documentation updates
• And more online resources for PHP-GTK users

Read on for more details about the PHP-GTK news from the first week of June 2006. It's browken down into three difference categories this time - Development, Documentation, and General changes - with a load of updates, espeically to the documentation.

In this new post on Tim Priebe's blog, he looks at a variety of the content manage ment system offerings out there on the web today, including several PHP-based options.

The list includes:

• PHPNuke (general)
• Drupal (general)
• Coppermine (images)
• WordPress (blogging)
• phpBB (forums)

Tim includes links to all of the resources and screenshots of each package in action. It's interesting to have a summary of some of the more major offerings lined up like this - a good starting place to branch from for other CMS research.

In this new article (set) from HTMLGoodies.com today, they're looking to start off web developers on the right foot with PHP by providing a good resource of basic, common tasks budding PHP developers tend to work at.

the series as times goes on, but for now they cover a good range of topics, including:

• Your first page with PHP code
• A Little about Variables
• Passing Data To and From Functions
• Using the File System

The Atlanta PHP User Group has posted an update to the information for their May meeting - they've found a place to have it, temporary though it may be.

This month's meeting will be a discussion of the Zend Framework - taking it for a test-drive, mentioning its current state/direction it's going, and showing quickly how to use it all (a code tutorial).

Justin Silverton shares withus today ten easy tips for speeding up your PHP applications with Apache.

The suggestions include things like:

• Enabling compression of HTML with the output_handler settings in your php.ini
• Move from file-based sessions to shared memory sessions
• Use output buffering
• Don't use images when text will do

Some of the suggestions are just general web development items (such as that last one), but some web developers out there need to be reminded of them. There are still too many image only sites out there...

James Gosling, the "father of Java," recently commented on PHP: "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems."

The headline here should be "Father of Java says writing web applications in PHP is simpler." Both .NET and Java have this be all things to everyone mentality. If you need that generalization, fine, but generalization is not without cost as Gosling points out.

Of course, Gosling defends Java over PHP/Ruby on the basis that they're "just scripting langauges" and not really made for the large-scale, general usage applications. The author also provides some links to articles about Flickr, one of the major PHP success stories.