On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:

Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?

There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Troels Knak-Nielsen has posted about a lesser known feature of the popular XDebug debugging tool - function traces.

In case you haven't heard of it before, it "allows you to log all function calls, including parameters and return values to a file", to quote the manual. After playing around with it for a while, I realised that this information could be parsed and used to determine parameter types and return types of functions.

To illustrate one use for the trace results, he create a simple script that parsed them and reinjected them back into a source file as docblock comments. Included in the post is an example of its usage and the resulting comments for a simple class. It can be downloaded from github.

Jeremy Johnstone has come up with a simple plist xml parser. The plist format is what iTunes (and some other application) uses for its library files.

Normally SimpleXML is enough to handle most XML parsing needs, but the plist XML format is just broken enough to make parsing it with SimpleXML virtually impossible. Since I hadn't played with XMLReader much, I thought it would be a good chance to give it a spin. For the anxious types, the code is available on github in my php_class_lib project, so dig right in.

His parser takes in the name of the file to fetch and a parser() method is called to do the actual work. The contents of the file are returned as an array (he includes a print_r() of that output too).