Matthew Setter has posted five reasons why he thinks that making a coding standard is an essential part of your development process. He suggests that "pain avoidance" is one of the key factors, both for new members of the team and for those maintaining it in the future.

Whenever you're working on a project, are you consistent? Are you consistent in your coding style, consistent in your documenting, consistent in your database naming conventions? Better yet, do you and your team have a coding standard which you consistently adhere to? If you don't, you're buying yourself and others a world of pain - which is painlessly simple to avoid. Today I'm banging the drum, shouting from the street corner, calling from the cathedral spire, imploring you to do one thing, above all else - pick a coding standard and then BE CONSISTENT!

His five reasons for implementing (and effectively using) a coding standard are:

• Poor, Inconsistent Code - Causes You Pain
• Your Code is Easier to Read
• Your Code is Easier to Understand
• Your Code is Easier to Maintain
• Your Code is Easier to Collaborate on

Check out the post for summaries of each point.

In a new post to his blog Lee Davis describes the enum conundrum - what's the right solution for effectively using ENUM-type fields in your data?

So a user signs up and I want to store a status that reflects their account, or at least an identifier representing that status. Their account could be active, disabled (temporarily), pending approval or maybe deleted. Should I use an enum? I've heard they're evil. Maybe having a reference table with statuses would be better? But now I have to manage a separate table just for that one snippet of data, is that overkill? Could I maybe use that status table for other entities? Or, could I instead just use an integer and reference it on the code level? What is the right solution?

He presents three of the most common situations he's seen for people using enums in the application:

• "I used enums all over the place" (maintenance between code and DB values)
• "use a reference table"
• "I could use a class constant to represent the enum" (enforced in the app)

Of the three, he suggests the third as the option with the most advantages. Not only does it make it simpler to get the allowed values for the field, but you're also more flexible in the kinds of validation you can do on the values.

Tom Schlick has a new post to his blog talking about a tool he's written for FuelPHP-based applications called Wrench. It's a command-line tool to make taking your site "offline" simpler.

If you have been following what I've been up to lately you would see that many of my recent projects are based on FuelPHP. Since Fuel is so awesome and allows you to create "packages" that can be dropped into your application, I have created a few that help me quickly piece together apps. The first package I'm "releasing" is called Wrench.

The tool works with the oil command-line tool already included in the framework to swap out the default action with a "Down for Maintenance" message. It will look at the current state of the app and switch it to the opposite when run, but you can also define "start" and "finish" manually if you'd like. You can find the source for the package on Tom's github account.

Richard Thomas has a suggestion for the Zend Framework development group - clean out the attic before you hit the 2.0 mark.

A big focus of 2.0 it seems is going to be performance and cleaning up the structure to make use of php 5.3 features which is great, I have been preaching the need for ZF to start taking performance as a real concern for a while now. On the other hand they have gotten to a certain point that they need to reflect on what they already have and not let the spiderwebs grow to large.

Richard points out that the Zend Framework, which has a focus on being a "business-class framework" and having the best to offer, has quite a few parts of it that are older and aren't well maintained. This sort of thing could cause some big problems down the line and could even cause some doubt over the developer's choice of frameworks.

Guilherme Blanco passed along a note about the latest releases from the Doctrine project, Doctrine 1.0.8 and 1.1.0-RC2:

Today I am happy to tell you that we have two new versions of Doctrine available for you to use. The first is the monthly maintenance release for Doctrine 1.0 and the second is another release candidate for the newest major version of Doctrine, 1.1. As always you can grab them from the downloads page.

Updates in these two versions include a few backported fixes from 1.1, updates to the Doctrine_Query::count() method for optimization, and several fixes in the Release Candidate in preparation for the next release. You can see the full Changelogs here: 1.0.8 and 1.1.0-RC2.

On the Ibuildings blog today Mikko Koppanen talks a bit about Open Source software projects and things that can help to make them successful.

An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right?

He recommends a team infrastructure growth as the application grows and the importance of documentation and maintenance after the project has been launched.

The CodeIgniter framework has made a new release today, 1.6.3, containing updates to fix a few bugs and address some security concerns.

We are happy to release CodeIgniter version 1.6.3 today. Version 1.6.3 is primarily a maintenance release, with a variety of bug fixes and some refinement to existing features (with a few new ones tossed in for good measure). Details of course can be found in the Change Log.

The release also fixes a potential cross-site scripting issue that, while it hasn't been reported as used yet, could still have some bad consequences if found and abused. You can grab this latest version from the CodeIgniter downloads page.

Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has posted an update on the status of the Zend Framework for the month of May:

This [May 15th maintenance release] reinforces our commitment to high quality and we will continue to release periodic mini releases on an as needed basis. [...] Not only is the Zend Framework user base growing rapidly but we are also seeing a sharp rise in adoption of ZF in business-critical commercial applications.

He mentions several major sites moving to use the framework like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IGN Entertainment as well as the update they've made to the contribution process to allow for easier submission and review.

The CodeIgniter project has released their latest version of their framework today - CodeIgniter 1.5.4:

Version 1.5.4 is primarily a maintenance release. For a list of all changes please see the Change Log. If you are currently running CodeIgniter please read the update instructions.

Included in the list of changes are things like:

• Added some additional mime types in application/config/mimes.php.
• Fixed MSSQL insert_id().
• Fixed a bug in display of queries with characters that would be interpreted as HTML in the Profiler output
• Updated the XSS Filtering to take into account the IE expression() ability and improved certain deletions to prevent possible exploits