Michelangelo van Dam has started a new series of posts on his blog about quality assurance in PHP projects with this introduction and a look at the first tool on his list PHPLint.

Quality Assurance has become an increasing important part of web application development, especially with PHP applications. [...] Luckily there are a lot of tools available that allows you to increase quality of these web applications, and the best part is they are all based on PHP! Let's have a quick look at what tools are interesting to start improving quality assurance on your PHP projects.

The first tool, PHPLint, helps you validate code against syntax errors and is built into the command-line PHP you already have. He describes its use, both on the command-line and in a pre-commit hook on his git repository

For more PHP QA-related information, he also points out the book from Sebastian Bergmann and Stefan Priebsch as a good reference too.

On the Content with Style blog, there's a "quickie" you can drop into a subversion hook as a part of your check-in that will run the lint command on only the changed files (not your entire repository).

If you haven't done it in a hook already, here's the quick way to check all your changed files for syntax errors.

This sort of command would be the most useful in a pre-commit hook to ensure that everything passes correctly. Their example only looks for ".php" files, but can be modified easily if you happen to use ".html" or another custom extension for your pages too.

Stoyan Stefanov posts about some handy PHP development tools that he's added to his TextPad software and wanted to share with the community.

There's four tools in the list (links off of his Tools menu):

• PHP lint (a.k.a. syntax check)
• PHP help
• PHP Manual
• JS Lint

On ones like the PHP manual, it's really a link to a browser that opens the right page on the PHP.net website.