On the Nelm.io blog today there's a new post (part one of a series) about using Composer and Packagist to manage PHP applications as packages.

You may have heard about Composer and Packagist lately. In short, Composer is a new package manager for PHP libraries. Quite a few people have been complaining about the lack of information, or just seemed confused as to what it was, or why the hell we would do such a thing. This is my attempt at clarifying things.

The briefly explains what the tool(s) do and shows how to set up the configuration on both sides - Composer to manage the packages and the package definition configurations (including meta about the project and any dependencies). He also answers several "why" questions about the need for a package manager, using this versus PEAR, the choice of JSON for config definition and a current status of the project.

In a new recent to his CodeFury blog Kenny Katzgrau (a member of the GetSparks team) looks at how to use the GetSparks.org service to get "sparks" for your CodeIgniter installation and make working with third-party services and other tools not included with the framework simple.

If you aren't already familiar, a package manager and repository for CodeIgniter libraries was released last week at GetSparks.org. In the few days between then and now, some very interesting and useful packages have been submitted. There's one for combining, minifying and caching assets, one for database scaffolding, viewing logs, geocoding, template-ing, etc.

A screencast is included showing his in-depth look into the service and how easy it is to use. He also points to the service's twitter account and github repository.

In a quick post Ruslan Yakushev points out that the PHP Manager for IIS is now available in five different languages to make it even simpler for the non-English speakers out there to use.

A new release of PHP Manager for IIS (version 1.1.2) is available for download. This release includes translations into 5 languages. [...] Note that this release still includes English and it is recommended to upgrade even if you do not need these translations

The new languages are German, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese and Russian and the post thanks each of the community members that helped with the translation. The PHP Manager for IIS is a tool for managing one or more PHP installations on a single IIS server.

In a recent post to his blog Rafael Dohms has shared a mini-application he's developed to work with his test users on Facebook when developing his applications - his Facebook Test User Manager.

Its possible to create up to 100 test users per app, creation allows you to choose whether the user already should have the application installed and which permissions you want them to have, using API calls. You can also remove users, list all of your app's test users and even create friend connections between them using the API. This really is a great resource, but using an API to get this information all the time is cumbersome and might take time away from your time to develop the application itself. This is where the Test User Manager comes in.

He explains some of his thoughts behind the development structure of the tool and includes some basic descriptions (and screenshots) of listing out the test users for an application, making a new user and creating/viewing the relationships between those users. As of the writing of his post, he's in version 0.9 which you can download from github. Obviously, you can also clone the repository and submit your own enhancements too if you'd like.

Most developers have heard of "The Joel Test" to help improve the quality of their software and the processes surrounding it. Joshua Thijssen has taken this one step further and created his own set of questions to act as a test for software development managers to make sure they're doing the right things for their group.

This post is not so much for developers as it is for the managers and bosses from those developers. As you probably know by now, managing software engineers (or programmers) is not an easy task. They just don't like to play by the rules you always took for granted. Why is that? Why are those pesky programmers too hard to handle? Why is it so hard to sit down, write code and shut up??

The questions are yes/no and, at the end of the test, your questions will be assigned to points from 0 to 12. Here's just a few of the questions (they all come with summaries to help you understand what its asking):

• Do you work with lenient working hours?
• Do you give enough time for planning?
• Do you enforce an IDE?
• Are your programmers in the loop?
• Do you have enough distraction for programmers?

In this new post to his blog today Brian Swan includes a video that's perfect for anyone wanting to know more about the PHP Manager for IIS but didn't have the time to get into it.

Last week, Ruslan Yakushev announced the release of the 1.1 version of the PHP Manager for IIS. I thought a tour of the PHP Manager functionality might work best in video format. I'd be interested learning what you think of the PHP Manager itself, but also in knowing what you think of the video format.

He covers me of the basics of the tool (except the installation, you'll have to do that yourself) including linking a version of PHP, managing php.ini settings, error reporting and working with extensions. If you're having trouble viewing it in his post, you can go directly to YouTube for it.

On Qafoo.com there's a new tool that's been introduced to help you keep track of the current Call for Papers that are currently happening for PHP conferences. The start of the PHP conference season is in full swing, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Their Call for Papers Manager can keep that information at your fingertips.

The tool works quite simple: You can add CFPs you know about and which are relevant for the PHP community through a simple form. In order to remember the CFPs, you can configure two kinds of reminders: fFor upcoming CFPs and for ending CFPs. For each of these lists, you can determine when to be reminded, like 2 days before the event occurs. These lists can then be easily integrated into your normal feed reader using an RSS or Atom feed.

You can use the URL requested to get different kinds of reminders delivered to your feed reader too. If you have a conference and your Call for Papers is open or upcoming, add it to the list!

In a new post to the techFounder blog today, Eran Galperin shares a tool that he's created to make life outside of the Zend Framework simpler. It's a simple script that, when they're needed, grabs the Zend Framework libraries from the remote SVN and drops them in place.

Reusing Zend Framework based code can be a bit of a pain - you do not want to include the entire framework just for a few classes, yet tracking down the dependencies needed to run your code can be time consuming and it's hard to tell if you aren't missing anything. To overcome those issues, I wrote a utility class to automatically resolve Zend Framework dependencies by fetching them from the online SVN repository when they are needed (and then storing them locally).

You can grab the tool from his Binpress account (under the MIT license). He also gets into some of the details on how the script works - how it uses an autoload to catch all of the class loading, checks for the file locally and if it's not there, grabs the remote. If there's dependencies for that, they're fetched as well. There's also an example of its usage (written out, not code, but you get the idea).

Kevin Schroeder has posted an article he'd written for the Zend news letter about non-PHP developers branching out into PHP for the first time and how easy the language makes it.

I have had the benefit of being able to program in many different languages for many different environments over the years. Throughout that experience there are 2 languages that have risen to the top of my favorites list. PHP is one, obviously. But Java is the other. [...] To access all of the functionality in Java, there is a tradeoff with simplicity. To access all of the functionality for the web in Java, there is a massive tradeoff with simplicity.

He notes the cost of using one over the other (hint, PHP's usually cheaper) and, an interesting point, a story about a Java developer that took around two days to get comfortable with PHP. He lists a few things PHP offers that help including the low installation/initial code barrier, loose typing and the definition of functions without a return type.