On the IBM developerWorks website, there's a new article that works to show some of the benefits of working with PHP code on the command line and some helpful ways to debug the code.

Of course, just the fact that you can use PHP on the command line isn't necessarily the best reason for doing so. However, you might quickly find several pleasant surprises when you first begin to experiment with PHP in this way. [...] In fact, there's really nothing stopping you from using PHP as your Swiss Army knife for almost any given programming project.

They walk through the installation and a sample of the debugging before getting into the more complex methods of finding and fixing errors, using the PHP I/O channels and the creation of your first command-line script (including the use of arguments).

David Coallier has an update today on the effort to get PEAR developers all over the world mapped out to a Google map to show their locations - one that's finally been launched.

Over the past weeks we have had many people asking around if it would be possible to have a place to see the pear developers around the world. Well now Christian Weiske and I (With the help of Arnaud Limbourg) have put up a nice little map system on pear.php.net. You can see it at http://pear.php.net/map/

David also links to images of some of the administration panels for the application (one, two, three) and the connection information for a web service (REST) that allows access to all of the data.

Etienne Kneuss has an update on the PHPT Generator project posted to his blog, mentioning specifically how it was used to discover documentation problems in the generated phpt files.

The main use of those phpt files was to have an easy way to check examples used in the documentation. Along with a php script analyzing the results and Hannes' great testing environment, I was able to generate a summary of the examples failing.

The results show that over 50% of the documents passed the test, with the rest split between failing because of missing extensions (9%) and because of an error in the example (41%).

In true tech fashion, the PHP-GTK Community Site is offering a new feature for the users (and viewers) of their site - a geolocation web service that helps you see locations of other site members.

The site offers "geo-nick", a simplistic API to obtain this [latitude and longitude] information coupled with the optional IRC nick field, to allow any developer to create mashups showing community PHP-GTK developers, as identified by nickname (no actual name information is made available through this API) on a map.

The post includes an example of how to use the API - what package to call and what the message should contain. The results are passed back in an array of nickname, lataitude, longitude.

Piggybacking on this new service, they also have a new tutorial showing how to access and use this service from a simple PHP-GTK2 application. It just grabs the results and dumps them into a simple text area in a window.

In his latest post, Ilia Alshanetsky shares a handy (and a little scary) tip on finding the location of a phpinfo page reliably to help figure out the common PHP settings developers out there are using.

The problem with finding a reliable pool of such pages is that basic search often contaisn many blog, forum, bugs.php.net and alike entries which area copy & paste outputs from users. This maybe fine in some instances, but what if you just want the real phpinfo() pages. The answer is surprisingly simple.

His solution? To search for an element always in the page, but unique to it - usually the term you're looking for (like his suggestion of "Zend Scripting Language Engine"). He links to two result sets, one from Google and the other from Yahoo.

Besides the phpinfo information, Ilia also mentions the other handy data you can find with similar searches to major search engines like Apache header information.