On Reddit.com there's a conversation kicked off by user swiftpants about making the move from procedural PHP programming to the world of object-oriented programming. They ask for advice from the community for the next steps to take to make the jump.

One thing I always have in the back of my head is that all my code is procedural and I should be making use of classes and ?? more. I have a very basic understanding of OO programming but I rarely implement it. Is there a good book or online guide that can get me on my way to OO programming in php. I am especially looking for feed back from self taught programmers.

There's lots of comments on the post talking about everything from:

• Introductory videos from KillerPHP
• Reading lots of other people's (OOP) code
• That OOP is more about code reusing and simplicity (DRY) than abstraction.
• You can learn a lot by working with one of the MVC/OO frameworks. Download one and build something.
• The suggestion of phptherightway.com

Have any other thoughts on the best ways to learn OOP in PHP? Share them here!

If you've ever looked at getting your ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer) certification but didn't know where to start, Lorna Mitchell suggests that 2013 is the year to do it and offers some tips (and her own guide to help you along the way).

A few people have told me it's their New Year's resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I'd make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won't be taking a whole preparation course.

She recommends a few things in general too like studying up with the free Zend PHP 5.3 ZCE guide, research into areas that might be a bit foreign to you and, of you have the time and means, try taking a course to walk you through what you'll need to know

If you're a PHPFog user, you know that they're discontinuing the service in favor of their AppFog product. If you're looking to migrate over to this from PHPFog, you should check out this new article from PHPMaster.com with some of the differences between the two services.

Have you heard PHPFog is coming to an end? No, well - it is. That's right, in a recent announcement on their mailing list, the company has said that PHPFog will be no more by the end of January, 2013. But if you're on their platform, don't panic! The new, combined platform may be even better than what you're accustomed to with them now.

He talks about some of the things that are different including the technologies it employs, addons it provides, the differing deployment process and when teh final cut-off date is. He links to their own migration guide for most of the steps but mentions one specific change that might trip you up - the change to store connection information in the "VCAP_SERVICES" environment variable.

PHPMaster.com has returned with the second part of their guide to code refactoring. In this second part they pick up where they left off and focus on code readability this time.

In part one of this series I introduced what constitutes good code. As the series on code refactoring continues we'll dive into each of the three aspects and see how to refactor for each of them in order: readability, extensibility, and efficiency. In this part, the focus is on refactoring your code for better readability. Recall the definition of readability: readable code follows some well-known style and documentation practices. To help you start refactoring your code for readability, I've prepared this list of questions you should ask yourself throughout the development, testing, and review process.

There's a few different types of things that contribute to readable code, so he breaks the article up into a few sections:

• General things like coding style guides, header comments and a reduction of global code
• Naming conventions, well-named variables and methods
• Simplified and easy to use expressions
• Blocks of code, their average size and complexity.

There's been a lot of talk recently about unit testing (and testing in general) in the PHP community and some of the terms that are thrown around might be confusing for someone coming into it fresh. NetTuts.com is here with a guide to help those folks make some sense of it all.

Lately, we've been hearing and reading more and more about test-driven development. This domain, however, comes with a series of expressions and specific jargon that can be confusing to newcomers. This article will walk you through the most common definitions, test types and test parts. Use cases will be provided, and, where possible, some code in PHP will also be presented.

They cover several of the common terms you'll come across when working with testing including:

• Automated testing
• Test fixtures
• Test cases
• DOC - Dependency-on component
• Component tests
• Acceptance testing
• Continuous Integration/Delivery

There's another site tossing their hat into the "best practices in PHP" ring (the other being PHP The Right Way) with what they call a "short, practical list for common and confusing tasks" in PHP - PHPBestPractices.org.

[Outdated tutorials and information is] one of the reasons why new PHP programmers are so frequently blamed for ugly, outdated, or insecure code. They can't help it if the first Google result was a four year old article teaching a five year old method! This document tries to address that. It's an attempt to compile a set of basic instructions for what can be considered best practices for common and confusing issues and tasks in PHP. If a low-level task has multiple and confusing approaches in PHP, it belongs here.

The site has sections for topics like:

• PHP & MySQL
• Single vs Double Quotes
• PHP regular expressions
• Validating emails
• Checking null and false values

If you're interested in helping out and adding more content to the site, contain the maintainer and let him know.

For those interested in getting started with the CodeIgniter framework, but want a more step-by-step guide to getting it up and running, this recent post from Mayank Kandpal can help.

Every other day, I develop new websites from scratch for various clients and sometimes for some of my own projects. Unless the project is really complex, I prefer to develop in CodeIgniter, a super-flexible (MVC) PHP framework which lets me develop super-quick !

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - from downloading the latest to creating the application and things like setting up logging and authentication.

The Aura Framework project has made a new post to their blog walking you through the steps you'll need to contribute back to the project with your ideas and bugfixes for their various components.

Sometimes you may have noticed a bug, or need a feature implemented, and need to contribute back to the aura community. These are some of the steps to help / contribute to aura project.

They walk you through: setting up git (well, point you to github's guide), fork the main repository and check out a copy, creating a remote to the "upstream" (main) repository and pulling the latest content from it into your fork. Included are the commands to run PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPUnit with the provided tests. From there, it's up to you and your code to contribute back, commit and make a pull request!

Anthony Ferrara has started a new series of posts to his blog that will introduce you to the source behind the project - the code that makes PHP tick. In this first part of the series, he gives more of an overview of things like where you can find the source and some basic C concepts.

In this post, we'll walk through the basics of the PHP application: where to find it, the general structure of the codebase and a few really fundamental concepts about the C language. To be clear, the goal of the series is to get a reading comprehension of the source code. [...] Additionally, this series is going to be based off the 5.4 codebase. The concepts should be pretty much the same from version to version, but this way there's a defined version that we're working against (to make it easier to follow later, when new versions come out).

He includes the link to the PHP SVN repository to grab the latest source, talks some about the general structure of the codebase and basic C information in case you're not versed in the language (like variables and pre-processor instructions).

Over on the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post looking at the next major upcoming PHP version (5.4), what it comes with and why you might want to make the upgrade.

PHP 5.4.0 is planned to be released on February, 2 2012. By the time you are reading this, it may already been out. It is a result of many months of development. Many features were proposed for this release. Some made into this version, others did not make it at least for now. So, now you may be wondering which interesting features really made it. Let me tell you more about some of the more interesting features present in this release.

The article mentions some of the usual major features that can be found in just about every "in PHP 5.4" list - traits, the built-in web server, binary notation for integers - but it also includes some of the features that didn't make the cut this time (like annotations and the inclusion of the APC caching extension). Also included are questions to ask to see if the upgrade is for you like:

• Do you need the new features?
• Do you need the updates now?
• Try it and test it in dev first - does it meet your needs or cause other bugs?

The planned release for PHP 5.4 is during the first week of February (2012). Additionally, if you'd like to give the PHP development group some help testing out the latest Release Candidate, you can find instructions here.