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.

On DZone.com today John Esposito has posted about three guides that want to help you improve your PHP development skills (including a forum post and two articles).

Sometimes, then, improving your generic 'programming brain' will help you improve your facility with a particular language. At other times, it's more important to learn the nuances of a language, paying close attention to the kind of applications the language is used for. [...] For improving your PHP, then, you can do two things: become a better programmer; and understand PHP more finely, more deeply.

The three guides share a lot of the same concepts in common - naming conventions, separation of functionality, DRY (don't repeat yourself), testing code, etc.

On the AjaxRay site today there's a new review of an introductory book from Packt Publishing about unofficial wiki is a BIG try to help in this issue. Besides, recently Packt has published the first book on Kohana "Kohana 3.0 Beginner's Guide". Jason D. Straughan wrote this book for Kohana version 3.x.

The review includes an overall assessment of the book, a detailed description of how the chapters are laid out and some of the complaints he had about the book's contents - a lack of code examples in some places, demos/screenshots pointing out what the framework can really do and the inclusion of some deprecated methods.

Overall, the book is well organized, focused and will be helpful on it's purpose. I felt it's capable to teach Kohana to a new guy, in a smooth way. Yes, there have some printing mistakes, old (because they are changed in new version) function use and some other minor issues, but seems ignorable to me. I'd recommend it for Kohana beginners.

Stuart Herbert has put together a series of posts detailing how to get the Phix component creation and management tool installed on various operating systems.

Phix makes it extremely easy to create and maintain your own PEAR-installer compatible components for reuse in your PHP applications. Installation takes just seconds, and it's both open-source and framework-agnostic!

The OS guides help you get it installed for:

• OSX
• Fedora
• Ubuntu
• Debian
• CentOS

For more information about Phix (including helpful "getting started" details) check out the project's website.

Since the CodeIgniter project has put much more emphasis on open source and having others contribute back to the framework they love, they've had questions about the best places to get started and the steps to contribute back. They've posted this Contribution Guide to help answer some of those questions.

CodeIgniter is a community driven project and accepts contributions of code and documentation from the community. These contributions are made in the form of Issues or Pull Requests on the EllisLab CodeIgniter repository on GitHub.

There's a few helpful hints on things like submission guidelines, the PHP style guide for the project, PHP version compatibility, which branch to submit requests against and a quick how-too guide on getting up and running with git/github if you're not familiar with it.

If you haven't seen it yet, there's a post over on StackOverflow that's been growing over the past few days about form-based authentication in websites. The author wants to make a definitive resource for people to use when making good, secure user authentication systems.

Please help us create the definitive resource for this topic. We believe that stackoverflow should not just be a resource for very specific technical questions, but also for general guidelines on how to solve variations on common problems. "Form Based Authentication For Websites" should be a fine topic for such an experiment.

They want to include topics like logins, storing passwords, "forgot password" security, OpenID, browser autocompletion, password strength, email validation and more. They already laid out eight different sections with summaries including:

• How To Remain Logged In - The Infamous "Remember Me" Checkbox
• Using Secret Questions
• Checking Password Strength
• Much More - Or: Preventing Rapid-Fire Login Attempts
• Two-Factor Authentication and Authentication Providers

There's some good feedback from other users with other suggestions and links to external resources that could shed some more light on the topic.

Thijs Lensselink has a new post to his blog today showing a step-by-step guide to setting up a vim editor environment to provide a richer experience than the plain-text defaults for working with your PHP code.

For my coding work i mostly use Zend Studio. And i am a big fan of this IDE. But i also do a lot of work in the shell. And that asks for at least basic vim knowledge. My colleague is a big vim fan. And does most of his work in vim. So last week i was compiling a cheat-sheet for my self. And came across a slideshow of one of Andrei Zmievski's talks. This slide show got me inspired enough to start playing around with vim a bit. And this is the result of it.

He walks you through everything from scratch - installing vim, setting up some of the configuration files, grabbing some plugins to help with highlighting, adding in ctags for code completion and a plugin to give the editor more of an "IDE feel". There's a few screenshots included in the post as well, so you can be sure your environment is looking the same as his.

If you've been looking to get involved in the Zend Framework project but haven't known where to get started, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has just to guide for you. It gives you the "short and sweet" things you'll need to know about contributing back to the project.

ZF2 development is ramping up. We've been at it for some time now, but mostly taking care of infrastructure: converting to namespaces, re-working our exception strategy, improving our test suites, and improving our autoloading and plugin loading strategies to be more performant and flexible. Today, we're actively working on the MVC milestone, which we expect to be one of the last major pieces necessary for developers to start developing on top of ZF2. A question I receive often is: "How can I contribute to ZF2?" Consider this your guide.

He talks about what you'll need to get started (including getting a CLA) and includes a few links to some resources to help you get the code you'll need and find some bugs to fix (or file one yourself). He also talks about the details of the project (like naming conventions), where it stands now and what sorts of things you can get started doing right away.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Cal Evans covering a recent release from McGraw/Hill (by Vikram Vaswani, frequently posted on the ZDZ) called Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide.

Vikram has been a long-time contributor to DevZone and is the author of our most popular article series, Zend Framework, A Beginner's Guide. [...] The language is easy to read, the examples are clear and there's even a joke or two in there that will make you groan. In short, I would recommend this book to any PHP developer with a firm grasp on object oriented programming in PHP. If you are not comfortable with OOP, this is not the book for you.

He gets "the bad" of the book out of the way first mentioning the book's tendency to jump from subject to subject and how he suggests models should be in Zend Framework applications (going with Doctrine over custom models). On the good side of things, he mentions the easy to follow writing style, the very complete code examples and the "complete" feel the book has.

Over on Reddit.com there's an interesting post (yes, despite some of the comments made on it) about variable variables that turns into a detailed look at PHP variable handling as based around "$".

OK, here's the thing: [variable variables are] only the entrance of the rabbit hole. [...] The first thing to understand is what $ is. $ is actually a shorthand for ${} and means "return the value of the variable whose name is contained in this".

The response goes on to talk about variable names as strings, a few string handling tricks that can be used when referencing them and how this works with objects too. Things get a bit more complicated when they start adding in more levels of "variable" and evaluations based on random results. Not overly useful information for the casual developer, but interesting to know none the less.