Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with links to a few good PHP-based CodePlex projects that he thinks look pretty useful for the development community out there.

Admittedly, I'm interested in some of these projects [tagged with PHP] purely out of curiosity, but some of them actually look useful. I won't claim that these are the best of the PHP projects on Codeplex (hence the question mark in the title), but here are some that piqued my interest and that I plan to check out.

The projects in his list are include PHP LINQ classes, Virtual Earth integration and the Zend Framework DB adapter for Microsoft SQL Native Client.

Instead of comparing the software itself, the GnomeOnTheRun.com blog takes a look at the project homepages of three major PHP CMS/blogging tools - Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress - to see when they might tell us about the project itself. (Some of the homepages are actually built using the software too).

I found some interesting things that might shed some light onto the different projects. This is all based on January 11th, and 28th homepages, so by the time you read this a lot may have changed. Rather than go into great detail, I'll provide short lists of interesting things I noticed.

He looks at three different sides of the sites - how the markup is structured and if they conformed to an HTML standard, the overall performance of the sites and the actual content of the site (how useful it is, the organization, etc). You'll have to read the post to see what his conclusions were, though.

Want to help out on the PHP project but not sure where to start? Lukas Smith suggests helping out with the wiki (at wiki.php.net).

I feel that I can make more of a difference in these other [personal] projects. [...] I hope others will pick up the slack and make sure that PDO gets love, at people diligently follow up on todo items mentioned on internals and that someone else picks up wiki.php.net and takes care of some regular maintenance stuff.

He mentions one thing specifically - an update that will need to happen to the Dokuwiki software the wiki runs on. If you're interested, send Lukas an email/leave a comment and he'll point you in the right direction.

Brandon Savage as a suggestion for anyone doing any kind of development work - use source/version control in your development, you'll be thankful later.

If you ask most developers about source control, they'll agree that it's a wise thing to use. They'll insist that they think it's important. But yet, why are so many companies out there still not using source control in their projects? A good number of companies that I've worked with failed to make use of source control, resulting in issues that would have been trivial otherwise. In this article we'll explore ways to make sure that if your company isn't using source control, that you can help make a change to this policy.

He makes a few suggestions about implementing version control in your environment (it doesn't need to come from the top), how it's best put in place before a crisis and how the real person that might need the convincing could be your fellow cowrokers.

As is mentioned in the latest post to his blog, Fabien Potencier has taken over as the project manager for the SwiftMailer project:

This is a great honor for me to take over such a project. The Swift Mailer project has been initiated by Chris Corbyn some years ago. He has done a wonderful job during the years, trying to find the best way to create a top-notch emailing solution for PHP. With the release of the 4th version of Swift Mailer earlier this year, I think we now have a very solid mailing library.

As a part of the effort to expand the use of the mailing library, it will become the default emailing solution for the Symfony framework. You can learn more about Swift Mailer from the project's website.

Cal Evans has a new post to his blog about good development teams, their energy levels and how Open Source projects seem to encourage both.

Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not "all of them", you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free.

He makes a few suggestions about what managers of developers can do to try to bring some of this energy into their projects (four meta-attributes). His suggestion is to try them out in your environment - not all of them are right for all situations - but don't try to force your development team into someplace they don't want to be.

NETTUTS.com has posted a few suggestions as to how you can organize your future PHP projects "the right way" and make them easier to maintain.

When starting out with PHP, it can be daunting figuring out how best to organize a project. If you've ever been confused with where to put your images, external libraries, or keeping your logic separate from your layout, then check out these tips; they'll get you heading in the right direction.

The tips include suggestions on things like the directory structure, a project-wide configuration file, creating the simple layout and templating code and an idea to use symlinks to point your web server to the most current directory for your code.

In his most recent blog post Raphael Stolt looks at using the Zend_Tool component of the Zend Framework to create project specific scaffolding and providers.

Working on a project involving several legacy data migration tasks, I got curious what the Zend_Tool_Project component of the Zend Framework offers to create project specific providers for the above mentioned tasks or ones of similar nature. Therefore the following post will try to show how these providers can be developed in an iterative manner by scaffolding them via the capabilities of the Zend_Tool_Project ProjectProvider provider, enlived with action/task logic, and be used in the project scope.

He includes sample code and commands to build out the "project-provider" and how to make them "pretendable". You can see the results by issuing the "zf" command and seeing how the example methods (import-specials, export-specials) are now integrated as a part of the tool's functionality.

On the Blue Parabola blog Keith Casey has posed a question about the motivations for working on an Open Source project - "Why help/contribute to a project? What's your motivation?"

It's a very good question and the answer should sound familiar to quite a few people...despite working on some fun and amazing projects, I had nothing to show for it because all were proprietary and some were even classified. As far as my professional career went, I had nothing to show for it. I had some stellar references and could talk (in vauge terms) about some things but I had zero code.

To fix things, he set about to build his missing portfolio of "show it to anyone" code that he could hand to a potential employer to show the quality of his work. This produced a nice side effect too - an influence for the better on his "real work" at his job (see this article for more info on that effect).

Leonid Mamchenkov points out an article that lists some of the common pitfalls developers should consider when it comes to working with Open Source projects.

The blog post talks about roughly the same, but from a different perspective. It's more for those who are starting a new project, rather then joining the existing one. There are plenty of 'myths' that go around about how is it is to do Open Source and how everyone can do it, and that all you need to succeed is to start. That's not so true, of course.

He outlines the article into some of the key points like:

• Your community will help you build HARD DIFFICULT FEATURE X.
• Folks can understand your code.
• Contributors are like coworkers.
• Cross distribution support is easy.
• Users help users and it's ok to just be a developer.

Check out the full article here: Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls.