The /Dev/Hell podcast, as hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode 28, "Canadian Twinkie Smuggler".

You can blame Chris's tomfoolery for how crappy he sounds, because his computer pooped all over himself and he had to call in on his iPhone. Nevertheless, we were able to discuss in detail the smuggling of mass-produced pastries of the Twinkie and Tastykake varieties. We also get framework security in the context of recent Rails vulnerabilities, and how PHP developers seem to have a heightened awareness of potential vulnerabilities. Ed's details his experiences starting a local user group, and then discusses his efforts to speak at developer/tech conferences about his struggles with mental illness.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting this and other recent episodes.

On the Zumba Engineering blog, Chris Saylor has a post announcing the open sourcing of mongounit, a PHPUnit extension useful for doing database testing directly on MongoDB databases - Mongounit.

One of our more recent projects has given the team exposure to MongoDB. As such, we needed an easy way to test the models that utilize mongo in a similar fashion to how we test models that talk to mysql. Using this framework, it's easy to implement mongo test cases to easily create fixture data in collections, or simply clear collections between test cases.

You can find the latest release of this tool on github and see an example testcase here.

Smashing Magazine has a great new article that's a must read for anyone looking to start up an open source project with some guidelines to follow as you get things set up.

At Velocity 2011, Nicole Sullivan and I introduced CSS Lint, the first code-quality tool for CSS. We had spent the previous two weeks coding like crazy, trying to create an application that was both useful for end users and easy to modify. Neither of us had any experience launching an open-source project like this, and we learned a lot through the process.

The article reads like a checklist of things you'll need to consider as you create your project - things like:

• Determining what your goals are
• Choosing a license
• Code structure and organization
• Documentation

There's also a few other suggestions that may or may not be useful depending on the project like "use a mailing list" or "use version numbers" but they're all good ideas. Even if you're already working with an open source project, this is a good overview and could give you food for thought on things you might have overlooked.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their January 2013 meeting, a loo at the "Current Trends of the PHP and Open Source Job Market" (from Ari Waller):

The presentation will be an overview of the current employment market and outlook specifically for PHP developers (as well as other Open Source related Open Source trends), based on the current supply and demands in the market place, as well as career oriented topics via Q&A (Resumes, Interviews, and overall job hunting tips and strategies). Ari will cover a year by year comparison from his previous talk and discuss changes and new trends going into 2013. He will also discuss how to work with recruiters as effectively as possible (if at all), as well as questions you have always wanted to ask regarding the the inner workings of IT Staffing.

Despite it being presented by a recruitment company, they have promised an open and honest conversation about the topic, not a sales pitch. If you'd like to attend, check out this page on the Atlanta PHP site for more information - including a new meeting location.

Have a user group meeting or event you'd like announced? let us know!

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

Matthias Noback has a new post today sharing some of his experiences working with Open Source software, specifically as it relates to this dealings with a "Symfony-friendly environment".

These days, good PHP object-oriented libraries are all around and easily available. To me, it is actually thrilling to be part of this flourishing community, while working with Symfony2 and blogging about the Framework, the Components and their neighbors (like Silex). [...] Still, to me, contributing felt like too big a step to take right now. Until a few weeks ago, when I was looking for something I needed (a PHP client for the Microsoft Translator API) and could not find a decent solution. I decided to make it myself, and share it online.

He shares his "checklist" of steps he followed to get the library up and working (less about the library and more about the process):

• Write the code
• Initialize a Git repository
• Add a composer.json file
• Add unit tests
• Make it open source and developer friendly
• Push your code to GitHub
• Register your project at packagist.org
• Register the Packagist Service Hook
• Versioning
• Continuous integration using Travis CI

He also suggests that, at least at the outset, you skip some of your tests that might rely on external data sources/resources (so the build can start as green on Travis) then coming back and refactoring to mock things out correctly. It might look like an intimidating list for a beginner, but it's a great process to follow to have a robust, effective development/deployment process.

The latest issue of the Web & PHP Magazine has been published - Issue #7, "Full Throttle". Articles included in this issue are:

• Introduction into scaling for Big Data: Cory Isaacson's new column
• What can developers learn from the road? - By Arne Blankerts
• How to be an open source rockstar in 7 easy steps - By Jen Kramer
• PHP security for the real world - By Michael Stowe
• Developing Web Applications in Haskell - By Patrick Brisbin
• Speed up your applications using IIS & WinCache - By Arno Hollosi

You can download this latest issue for free as a PDF as well as picking up the past 6 issues with some great PHP-related content inside.

7PHP.com has posted another interview with a PHP community member - this time it's with Matthew Turland, one of the co-author's of SitePoint's "PHP Master: Write Cutting Edge Code" and known speaker/author.

In this edition I talked with [Matthew Turland @elazar], co-author of the PHP book 'PHP Master:Write Cutting Edge Code'. He currently works as a Senior Platform Engineer for Synacor Inc. Matthew was also a former technical editor for php|architect Magazine, contributor to the Zend Framework project and has spoken at conferences like ZendCon and php|tek. On the FOSS side, Turland is the man behind the Phergie project - a PHP-based IRC bot.

His answers talk about things like:

• What kind of environment (and tools) he uses for his development
• His work on the Phergie IRC bot project
• Resources he recommends for those new to the language
• What software he recommends/appreciates
• Some of the good and bad about conferences he's attended And a recommendation to check out the PHP Mentoring project for more guidance

So you've been working on your own code for a while now but have been hearing about Github and how it makes it simple to contribute to other projects too. Maybe you haven't found the time to get into git and Github yet. Well, this new post (a reprinted article from php|architect) to Lorna Mitchell's blog will tell you all you need to know.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren't involved in open source, either because they don't know how to approach a project, or because they just aren't sure how the process even works. In this article we'll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

She covers all you'll need to know to get in and get going with Github - forking a current repo (she uses Joind.in as an example), cloning your fork, making updates and submitting them as a pull request back to the main project. There's also some things about general git topics like branching, merging from the upstream source and using "git log" to view the changes.

The Zend Framework is proud to announce the first stable release of the long awaited Zend Framework v2 codebase!

The Zend Framework community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 2.0.0 STABLE! [...] Zend Framework 2 has been years in the making. Version 1.0.0 was released in July 2007 -- over 5 years ago! Since then, we've incrementally added features, building on the solid base we'd created.

[...] It's not perfect. No software project is. But I think it's qualitatively better. We finally achieved a dream that was conceived in the 0.X days of Zend Framework, to be able to create and consume standalone modules of MVC code.

They mention the work of a few different individuals and some of the newer pieces of functionality in this version like the ModuleManager and the dependency injection container, ZendDi. They already have three things posted to help you get started with this latest release: the latest download, a skeleton application and the ability to try out ZF2 on phpcloud.