Ed Finkler has put together what he calls the MicroPHP Manifesto, a call to arms for the PHP community to get "back to the basics" and focus more on things like good well-crafted code rather than extending out into "complex, verbose solutions."

The approach I've been taking lately is to start with as lightweight a foundation as possible, in the form of a "microframework." [...] For additional functionality, I pull in lightweight libraries that help me accomplish only the tasks I need. Clarity and brevity are my top considerations. My other big consideration is the commitment I make when I use code I didn't write.

He goes on to talk about difficulties finding lightweight libraries to suit his needs and gives some cloc benchmarks for the Symfony HttpKernel and the Slim and Epiphany microframeworks. The end of the post is the most important part - the manifesto itself...one he hopes will ring true with the development community. It includes things like:

• "I am a PHP developer. I am not a Zend Framework or Symfony or CakePHP developer."
• "I like building small things with simple purposes."
• "I need to justify every piece of code I add to a project."
• "I want to write code that's easily understood."

For more read the full post over on his blog.

Nikita Popov talks about the SOLID coding practices and creates his own acronym for the complete opposite - STUPID (Singleon, Tight coupling, Untestable, Premature optimization, Indescriptive naming, Duplication).

Ever heard of SOLID code? Probably: It is a term describing a collection of design principles for "good code" that was coined by Robert C. Martin (aka "uncle bob"), our beloved evangelist of clean code. [...] So, why not approach the problem from the other side for once? Looking at what makes up bad code.

He goes through each part of his STUPID acronym and talks about how it can hurt your code and a few alternatives to help make your application more flexible and easier to maintain in the long run. He also mentions GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Principles), another set of good practices to follow, some similar to SOLID, that can make your app better.

On DZone.com today John Esposito has posted about three guides that want to help you improve your PHP development skills (including a forum post and two articles).

Sometimes, then, improving your generic 'programming brain' will help you improve your facility with a particular language. At other times, it's more important to learn the nuances of a language, paying close attention to the kind of applications the language is used for. [...] For improving your PHP, then, you can do two things: become a better programmer; and understand PHP more finely, more deeply.

The three guides share a lot of the same concepts in common - naming conventions, separation of functionality, DRY (don't repeat yourself), testing code, etc.

On pingdom.com there's a recent article posted looking at some of the technology behind Facebook and how they manage to keep up with the huge demand put on them and their servers.

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren't practical. The challenge for Facebook's engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

They have to be able to handle over 570 billion page views a month across over 30,000 servers so there's several key technologies than they use to help make this a reality. Besides the famous HipHop for PHP tool, they also use things like memcached, Cassandra, Hadoop and Varnish. There's also other non-tech specific practices they do to keep things flowing smoothly.

Samuel Folkes has posted a few practices (seventeen, to be exact) that PHP developers should "banish forever" from their development habits.

The following is a list of 17 PHP programming practices that in my opinion should be banished into oblivion. Forever and ever. Amen. Please note that this list is in no particular order.

Some of the practices include:

• Relying on Magic Quotes
• Mixing HTML, PHP, SQL, JS, CSS, Etc, Etc
• Not Documenting Code
• Using Regex Functions for Basic String Manipulation.
• Unquoted Array Keys
• Using Uninitialized Variables

There's lots more where those came from so check out the rest of the list here.

Mike Bernat has come up with a list of (eight things) his best practices when it comes to PHP development:

I suggest a more retro-active approach [than trial and error]. Studying, surrounding, and forcing yourself to abide by best-practice coding standards will yield surprising results in your applications despite the fact that it may seem like more work than it's worth.

Topics included in his list are things like:

• Always develop with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT
• Portability, Portability, Portability!
• Don't over-think!
• Validate & Sanitize your Inputs!

Check out the rest of the post for more suggestions and explainations.

Kathy Ried has posted about some of her experience (including being a speaker) at this year's BarCampMelbourne 2008:

BarCampMelbourne2008 was, simply put, AWESOME! BarCampMelbourne2008 was held at Thoughtworks [wikipedia] at 155 Queen Street, Melbourne on 23 Feb 08, and had approximately 60 in attendance.

She talks not only about the conference itself (the male vs female attendance, the presence of Apple laptops and the age of attendees) as well as her talk on the advancement of practices at her workplace and other talks like an intro to APhpLix and how to use PHP Under Control.

The this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, Matthew Weir O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny wil be presenting a "Best Practices" session, which Matthew talks a bit about in his latest blog entry.

We had so much fun presenting during last year's conference, we thought we'd do it again. The session is a pre-conference tutorial session, running for 3 hours on Monday morning, 30 October 2006.

The session will be divided up into two different main sections - programming practices and tools and processes. Each of these have their subsections, including test drive development/unit testing, project documentation, and collaboration tips and tools.

Kore Nordmann has posted about the talks from the PHPWeekender event being posted online.

The talks followed three topics:

• Best Practices - security, performance up to basic OOP features in PHP and debugging
• Object-oriented programming - "OO Candy store"
• and the ever-popular "Enterprise PHP"

You can check out the slides and information for each of the talks on Kore's own page listing them out (as well as some other great talks from other conferences).

It's always good to finish a rather large project, and Robert Peake shares his joy in this new post on his blog nothing that not only is the project off and running, but it was all created based on a best practices/standards-based approach with respect to PHP development.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.