Matt Setter has a quick new post that suggests a way you can get more done with less work - simplicity.

Though we can do so many things simultaneously - should we? Does it actually reduce effectiveness and productivity which are the antithesis of professional application development? [...] I had the thought, as is common in a western-based mentality, that to be busy, to be industrious, to try and multi-task a series of independent tasks and projects simultaneously was the right thing to do. It's meant to be a simple formula: "Greater productivity = Greater self-worth right?" Sounds almost like Thatcherism. I felt that this was not only right, but the sign of an intelligent and sophisticated developer, who truly had honed his craft. Perhaps you've felt the same at one time or another?

He points out that, while it's very easy for developers to fall into this trap and way of thinking, it's not sustainable. It leads to stress, bad code and even - possibly - an even higher bug count. Instead he suggests the good standby idea of "KISS" (essentially, simplicity).

Instead of trying to do everything at once - I stopped and decided to only do one thing at once. And that one thing, had my full attention and focus. When it was done, I then moved on to the next one. Not before and not after.

He includes some of his own experience trying to apply this in a Zend Framework 2 application.

Jason Gilmore has put together a list of sixteen best practices and tools you can use to help make your PHP development life easier and the quality of your code better.

[I spent so] much time in fact that in 2010 I penned more than 130 articles. Many of these articles focused on PHP-specific best practices and productivity, two topics which should resonate closely with anybody involved in building websites for a living. So I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the sixteen tutorials which touch upon these topics. In this list you'll find tutorials introducing testing, debugging, advanced object-oriented features, code profiling, security, enforcing coding standards, and more.

His list of articles includes:

• 10 Productive PHP Tools for Testing and Debugging
• Three Advanced Object-Oriented PHP Features You Need to Know
• Four Sane Solutions for PHP Debugging
• Enforcing Coding Standards with PHP_CodeSniffer
• Use PHPUnit to Implement Unit Testing in Your PHP Development

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a list of ten tools that can help you increase your productivity in your PHP development including ones for testing, automation and debugging.

Frustration can quickly set in when you are dealing with menial and often repetitive tasks such as manual code testing and deployment, yet you strive to become a more efficient programmer by staying DRY. So why not extend that quest to other parts of the application lifecycle, streamlining and automating such tasks? In this article I'll introduce you to ten PHP development tools that will help you do exactly that, leaving you with more time to concentrate on building great websites.

His list of ten tools consists of:

• PHPUnit
• Phing
• Github
• FirePHP
• XDebug
• PEAR
• PHP_CodeSniffer
• phpDocumentor
• PHP_Beautifier
• phpUnderControl

In a new post to the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has taken a look at the productivity that PHP allows developers (from a development perspective) and a case that he's come across that proves his point.

At the [Sogeti's Engineering World conference] there was a coding contest. Contestants could team up and had to write an application that found the shortest route through an arbitrary maze. [...] It wasn't until the second to last session during the conference that Juliette, Erik, Ian and Felix decided to not go see a talk but to attempt the contest.

The solution was presented to a largely non-PHP audience and benchmarked against some of the other entries created with other languages. The results were pretty amazing - while the PHP version didn't work through the problem the fastest, it did have a much shorter development time and lines of code.

On the IBM developerWorks site, there's part one of a new series that combines the latest version of the Zend Framework with the power of Google applications to create a custom web application.

In this three-part "Create a productivity package with the Zend Framework V1.5 and Google applications" tutorial series, we will build an application with Zend Framework V1.5 that uses the Google applications. Here in Part 1, we explore the various features of the Zend Framework, outlining the many new features in V1.5 that we will take advantage of to build an example Web site.

This first part introduces the Framework briefly and helps you create some simple controllers and views. They use the Zend_Layout to help with the output and show how to implement view helpers to make components for the pages. There's no connections to Google in this initial part - that'll come later on.

You'll need to register/login to get to it.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has posted a few handy tips for PHP developers fond of working in one of the most powerful command-line editors, Vim.

I use Vim for all my editing needs -- TODO lists, email, presentation outlines, coding in any language... everything. So, I thought I'd start sharing some of my vim habits and tools with others, particularly those that pertain to using Vim with PHP.

He includes tips for things like mapping keystrokes (to the PHP interpreter and linter), using the Project plugin to make setting up projects easier and a mention (again) of ctags.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted briefly about an award that the Zend Framework/DevZone received at this year's Jolt Awards (the "Oscars of our industry).

Both Zend Framework and Zend's DevZone were nominated for Jolt Awards this year. Zend Framework walked away with a "Jolt Productivity Award", for a project that is still in it's 1.x version, this is awesome!

Other categories in this year's event included "Technical Books", "Collaboration Tools", "Development Environments" and the category the Zend Framework was in - "Libraries/Frameworks". It beat out the Eclipse Modeling Project and the Spring Framework for the top spot in productivity.