Jaisen Mathai has a helpful hint for those that do any offline work with PHP on their own development systems - how to mirror the PHP manual on a local web server.

In addition to [a local copy of your source] being faster to develop, it lets you work without needing to be connected to the Internet. But what about the tools you use while developing? If you're a PHP developer then the manual at php.net is an invaluable tool. It only make sense to have it available for when you're not online.

His example follows the official mirroring part of the PHP.net website and uses a slightly modified rsync command to fetch the manual information from the php.net site and drops it in a location locally. He throws in an Apache configuration too for a simple VirtualHost to get it up and running.

Symfony developers that do work offline will be happy to know that the framework's documentation is now available as a PDF:

As of today, most of the symfony documentation is available as PDF files. The PDF files are available for all major symfony versions.

They also link to the Jobeet tutorial (Propel/Doctrine), their Forms book and Cookbook.

In this new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann looks at how to use Bazaar (a dstributed version control system) in his development the PHPUnit tool.

Last December, when I was in Australia and started to work on the Object_Freezer code, I "dived into" Bazaar (bzr) and learned the value of local commits as they allow me to work offline, e.g. when disconnected during travel. Thanks to bzr-svn, I can now work offline for PHPUnit development as well.

He shares his setup - a local shared repository for branching/trunk work and a linked checkout of PHPUnit between Bazaar and Subversion. This allows him to commit locally with Bazaar and, when he gets back online, issue a "merge" command to make the push back out to Subversion's remote repository.

In the process of debugging one of his scripts, Brian Moon came across a default setting (and problem) in the MySQL extension that didn't seem to make much sense to him:

There are several reasons that PHP could not be able to connect to MySQL. [...] Or, perhaps the entire server is offline.

The mysql.connect_timeout setting in the php.ini is supposed to handle this sort of instance, but the default is set tpo 60 seconds. It's only apparently used when the server is completely offline and, in his opinion, is set way too high. He's proposing a patch to the MySQL extension to change this setting's default to shorten it to something a bit more reasonable.