Now that we're in to May, there's only one thing on a PHPer's mind (well some of them out there) - testing! This month several groups all around the world have set times for their own TestFests to dedicated time to writing up tests for PHP.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. [...] All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests.

Several groups have set up their times (here's the list) including teh Atlanta PHP group's happening today and the Cologne/Bonn user group's happening tomorrow. If you want to get in on the action and haven't found a group, check out the list and see if there's one nearby and join up before the event starts!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a checklist as a reminder of things to bring with you to your local event.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).