Travis Swicegood, a member of the Standards Group that has formed in the PHP community, has posted some of his own thoughts about the group and what kinds of goals he sees it having.

A few weeks ago at php|tek, I corralled developers from all of the major PHP frameworks into one of the conferences rooms. The idea was simple: in the PEAR Group we've been discussing our new PEAR2 Coding Standard and have come to some conclusions on how PHP 5.3 code should be handled moving forward. A standard is only a standard if people use it, though, and PEAR is not entirely representative of the community at large. That's where this group comes in.

He mentions resolving namespacing issues around naming structures, classes/interfaces/abstracts and for Exceptions. He also sums up his thoughts on the openness of the group well:

I'd love to see an officially sanctioned standard come out of our work. All of us are too busy, both with real jobs and our various projects, to fight the battles that come of trying to make this a completely open process where anyone with an email address can contribute. Sad as it may be, pear-dev has demonstrated that coding standards *must* go the way of sausages and laws lest they devolve into a constant "but I think is better, and this is why..." followed by pages of well meaning, but generally irrelevant content.

Though it contains no code, this new article on PHPBuilder provides a good perspective for those looking to get into PHP and what to expect to find.

A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article.

The author talks about the methods followed to get into the language, including making smaller goals at first, just to get used to things. The manual is also suggested as a "best friend" for a developer and looking at other people's code can provide insight into your problems.