The latest episode of the "/dev/hell" podcast has been released - Episode 4: "The Cool Kids Club".

Our fourth episode is all ready for your listening pleasure. In this exciting episode we focus on "The Conference Experience" and discuss why programming conferences are so important to developers. Chris talks about why CodeMash was so awesome and the awesome talks full of awesomeness that he attended. Ed talks about his own experiences with speaking and attending conferences, complete with a total derail by Chris on why a certain conference rubbed him the wrong way. Oh yeah, you also find out our opinions on what constitutes a "well-written PHP application". I'm sure you will be surprised by our answers.

You can either listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly.

In a new post to his blog Michael Maclean looks at the current CMS ecosystem and wonders "where are all the decent CMSes?" He's been having trouble finding one and really wants to know.

I've been recently asked to check out some CMSes for someone, and try to find a recommendation. What I've been finding hasn't really been encouraging. Out of the several CMSes I've tried, they've all failed for various reasons. I admit that I might be looking at this from a slightly different perspective than most - that of admining it and coding against it, rather than as a user - but it's still rather disappointing.

He briefly looks at a few of the more popular offerings - Silverstripe, Concrete5, CMS Made Simple, Joomla! and the old standby - WordPress.

What's going on? This is what PHP is supposed to be good at. Where are the simple, lightweight CMSes with modern code?

There's plenty of comments so be sure and read them - everything from suggesting that the net should be cast wider to "PHP applications" versus just CMSes out to suggestions for other CMSes to try out (quite a few of those).

Kevin Schroeder has posted some of his thoughts how how you, the one looking for good PHP developers, can really get the best talent out there you can find based on his experiences in interviewing other developers.

I can interview for certain (but by no means all) PHP positions because I know a fair about PHP and I believe that being smart but being an asshole does not make you a good PHPer. But not everyone who interviews knows that. And not only that, it is getting difficult to find good PHP developers. A lot of the good ones are being taken up by top companies, but even they are having trouble finding all the good developers they need.

He suggests coming up with something a bit more concrete than just this vague picture of what a "good PHP developer" is and how, even once that's defined, the quality of all developers should be raised to that level. He asks for some feedback on a few related questions like: is there really a shortage of good PHP developers or what are the significant topic areas that PHP developers should know well? Lease him some feedback on the post.

On the Test.ical.ly blog there's a recent post asking about good software architecture and how you could define it simply without having to muck around with all of the details it tends to conjure up.

What is a good architecture and why are there apparently two opposing trenches supporting quality on the one side and speed of development on the other side? After having had enough time to think about this whilst flying to Spain I came to the conclusion that Nils question whether it would be better to start quick and dirty to fail cheap in case the project is a looser or to stick to a clean and solid architecture and spend more time and money. Does quick always have to be dirty, clean always have to be slow, is dirty always quicker?

He suggests that "good architecture" and "quick and dirty" are the two opposite ends of the same spectrum. Instead, he suggests that a pragmatic approach is the best - focusing on what needs to be done rather that how to get there. Also by applying the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality to current methods and technologies, you can save a lot of hassle in the long run.

Nurul Ferdous has posted his "two cents" on Doctrine - his thoughts on the good and bad things about the popular ORM tool.

What is Doctrine? Doctrine is a popular ORM for PHP which works with RDBMS via PHP objects. This is built inspired by Hibernate from JAVA. This acts as an abstraction layer between PHP and RDBMS.

In his list of good things about Doctrine are things like its hiding of business logic, automatic CRUD, automatic modification of DQL queries, migrations and unit testing interfaces. On his "bad list" are things like not being able to use foreign keys as an identifier, heavy emphasis on an "id" column, not all data types are in DBAL and the SQL constructs missing in DQL. He also includes a scenario where he definitely not use Doctrine - a specific example from a project he just worked on that pushed the limits of the tool.

If you or your company is looking to hire on PHP developers but are having trouble finding good, qualified people, you should check out some of the advice that Cal Evans has posted to his blog to help you out.