On Reddit.com there's a good discussion going on to answer the question "What non-PHP stuff should a PHP developer know?"

I was looking at job description for a web developer, and one of the big responsibilities was database maintenance. [...] And along those lines, what other skills would be useful for a PHP developer to have that aren't directly PHP-based?

Suggestions so far include things like:

• Linux command-line skills
• some Python
• Virtualization (making and administering VMs)
• Version control systems (svn or git)
• Database architecture
• HTML/CSS/Javascript

In this new post to his blog Artur Ejsmont shares some of his thoughts on bugs and how they can effect the quality of your software. He touches on topics like handling bug reports, how random code changes effect them and how effective a code review can be.

From time to time I see bugs in the code and I start thinking "really? is it possible that no one noticed that bug before? am i the first person to see this code?". I thought it might be worth writing a little post on what helps me to deal with bugs and software quality in general and what are the common pitfalls in developer's thought process. Although it is not a very extensive post i hope it may inspire some developers to try new approaches.

Other topics he offers for consideration involve the fact that bugs will never fix themselves (they might disappear in a refactor though), that the bug is almost never in the language/data source's code and how automated (unit) testing can help to find new bugs before they're released to the users.

Following up from his (now infamous) MicroPHP manifesto, Ed Finkler has this new post to his blog answering some of the common questions he's gotten about his beliefs.

My previous post, The MicroPHP Manifesto, resulted in much excitement. In between fits of rage and crying, I found some time to answer folks questions, and also discuss the topic on the /dev/hell podcast with my cohost Chris Hartjes. To summarize and address some of the common questions, I felt I should write a small FAQ.

Questions asked so far include:

• So you think full-stack frameworks suck?
• You need a large framework to enforce best practices!
• You should check out my microframework!
• How do you choose what gets listed in the MicroPHP code collection?
• Why do you hate Rush?

If you have a question you don't see listed, drop him a note and he'll add to the post with more answers.

Rafael Dohms has a new post to his blog about some of the lessons he learned attending this year's PHP Benelux conference both from the perspective of attending the conference and having been at several conferences around the world.

After hearing about how great PHP Benelux Conferences were I finally made it over to Belgium to check it out, and i was impressed. To catch you up on the new, I moved to Amsterdam last december and thus had the chance of attending the conference which is now 2 hours away on a train ride. I could not expect less of a wonderful conference when names like Michelangelo van Dam are involved and this was no exception.

Among his suggestions, there's things like:

• Value your sponsors
• Value your attendees
• Make your attendees pay
• Value the organizers and your volunteers

...and one of the most important ones: "Have Fun!" If you're not following this piece of advice, you're probably doing it wrong.

Over on the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post looking at the next major upcoming PHP version (5.4), what it comes with and why you might want to make the upgrade.

PHP 5.4.0 is planned to be released on February, 2 2012. By the time you are reading this, it may already been out. It is a result of many months of development. Many features were proposed for this release. Some made into this version, others did not make it at least for now. So, now you may be wondering which interesting features really made it. Let me tell you more about some of the more interesting features present in this release.

The article mentions some of the usual major features that can be found in just about every "in PHP 5.4" list - traits, the built-in web server, binary notation for integers - but it also includes some of the features that didn't make the cut this time (like annotations and the inclusion of the APC caching extension). Also included are questions to ask to see if the upgrade is for you like:

• Do you need the new features?
• Do you need the updates now?
• Try it and test it in dev first - does it meet your needs or cause other bugs?

The planned release for PHP 5.4 is during the first week of February (2012). Additionally, if you'd like to give the PHP development group some help testing out the latest Release Candidate, you can find instructions here.

In this recent post from Charles Sprayberry he explains why using dependency injection (DI) in your application is a good idea and can help make things easier in the long run.

Dependency Injection is just a fancy term for passing dependencies to the object needing them instead of letting the object create its own. Hopefully, you've watched this great Google Clean Code talk about dependency injection by Misko Hevery where he talks about why you should ask for things instead of looking for them. I'm gonna talk about some reasons to use DI beyond just those presented in the video.

He breaks it up into a few different sections:

• It helps in the battle against global state
• It helps your design
• It makes using the single responsibility principle easier

In this recent post on Reddit.com, there's some good discussion/feedback about the proposed redesign of PHP.net.

Opinions from commentors range widly:

• "The layout's nice. But those colors are downright disgusting."
• "To be honest, the new version is 100x better."
• "It's definitely way better than the old design but still not exactly great is it?.."
• "Much more profressional. Welcome to the 21st century PHP.net."

Have an opinion on the new layout? voice it here!

In this new post to his blog Jani Hartikainen wonders if "everything needs to be integrated into a framework".

There is occasionally people asking about things such as "Is there an integration for X in framework Y?" Then they are disappointed when it isn't, acting as if it's a really bad thing. But why do things need to be integrated to begin with?

He points out that other frameworks (ex. Ruby on Rails) have a lot of things integrated, but he doesn't agree that this should be the standard. He suggests that, by not having tools that are tightly coupled with the framework you're using, you open yourself up to a wider, possibly better range of external tools.

One could argue that integrated libraries give you a productivity boost. While it may be so, I think the main boost you get is the very first steps: It's easier to get started, but after that the benefit fades. In the long run, it may even turn into a poor investment in general, as you could have learned a general purpose tool instead.

In this new post to his blog Wojciech Sznapka compares three different frameworks - Symfony2 (PHP), Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails (Ruby) - in their request handling performance, lines of code and average community on Github.

If you ask me, which one is the best - I can't point one, all of them are very good. But let's try to measure frameworks. For purpose of this article, I created three applications in Symfony2, Django and Ruby On Rails. All those apps do the same - show two tables, one shows top USA cities (by population), second shows US states with highest number of big cities (above 100k citizens). I don't want to measure frameworks by echoing "Hello world", because it's pointless.

Each of his applications use the same data set and use a default ORM with optimized queries, HTML rendered by an internal template engine and rounded floats. His performance requests (using Apache's ab) for this sample application show Symfony2 being able to handle the most requests/second followed by Ruby then Django. Symfony2 comes in at a larger file size than both the others combined, though. As far as the community is concerned, Ruby on Rails outpaces the others with about three times as many "watchers" on Github.

Be sure to read the comments for some opinions, both for and against his results.

Kevin Schroeder is looking for suggestions. He wants to know what the PHP community wants to hear about in upcoming webinars from Zend.

Just wrapped up a call working on our webinar schedule for the year. We've got a bunch of ideas but we'd like to also get your input as well. Yes, I know y'all want ZF2 webinars. We have that down. I would also like to do an HTML5 and mobile webinar but I need an SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that. [...] I would also love to have webinars on how to use various API's, even if there is not native PHP support. So, what kinds of webinars do you want?

Leave your suggestions in his comments along with one already suggesting a "Why PHP?" checklist of sorts to help encourage companies/employers to go with the language.