Sebastian Bergmann has posted a reminder for his upcoming PHPUnit workshops happening in Melbourne, Australia (Aug 4th-6th) and in Brisbane (Aug 11th-12th and 14th).

A few seats are still available for both of these workshops. Secure your seat today! I am also available for in-house training, coaching, and consulting around the days of the workshops.

You can save your spot for one of these events by visiting this page and entering you info (you'll want the "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects" option).

Brian DeShong has posted some of his "food for thought" on the development process that's behind the scenes of different PHP applications.

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking on development processes and quality, specifically for large-scale, professional PHP-based projects. [...] Generally speaking, my perception is that software development shops that really care about and emphasize quality have processes that consist of things such as writing use cases, unit testing and continuous integration.

He knows how he feels about all of this, be he wants to hear back from the community. How far does quality assurance go in your group? What kind of time/funding does this involve? Leave him a comment and let him know...

Lukas Smith looks, in a new post today, asking for some of the current thoughts and feelings surrounding the process of QA-ing PHP applications.

He goes through five different steps in a QA process that can help you find the issues with your application long before any user gets their hands on it:

• using testing tools like PHPUnit or phpt (including code coverage
• moving on to Selenium or BadBoy (or similar testing tools) to check the runtime flow
• making ample documentation with things like phpDocumentor or Doxygen
• Providing debugging tools for frameworks to make locating errors easier than digging through code and comments
• use code analyzers to check for attacks/vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting or SQL injections

So what am I missing? Any tool I should have mentioned, team management approach? I am sure I have since I just wrote this blog post very quickly and I do not have a check list yet. Speaking of checklist, that sounds like a good thing to have when doing QA.

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!

On the Zend Developer Zone, they point out a handy little image manipulation class they've come across - GenXDesign's PHP Thumbnail Class - as well as some details about it.

I've seen a lot of implementations of thumb nail functionality in PHP, I've even written a couple of my own. I like this class thought. In looking over the code the first thing you notice is that it's clean code. I don't mean they use the latest whiz-bang method to cshave a few keystrokes.

This code is simple, nicely formatted and easy to read through. My only real problem with the code itself is that it is not terribly well documented. That can be forgiven since easy to read.

Cal talks about some of the other features of the class, including that it works with gif/jpeg/png images, makes it easy to set the quality of the jpgs, and makes it easy to display the dynamic images directly to the browser. Check out the demo for more.

It seems everyone is talking about frameworks these days - even the PHP community is no different. Talk of the Zend Framework and other MVC-based offerings out there is showing up on sites and blogs all over. On one, however, Brandon asks the question more should think of on a daily basic - what makes a good framework?

As of lately, I've been working on making a simple low key MVC framework. This isn't a project that will be released to the community or large amount of people, its for building on a level of personal development, to mentally challenge myself, and to touch up on my PHP skills.During this process, I begun to question the motivation and driving points behind these builds. What exactly makes a good framework? Everyone and their dog are using them, what exactly is the advantage point of using a framework over hard coding, something on the go.

He is of the opinion that the real key to a good framework is that it be easily customizable, that "users and developers should be able to adapt it to their specific needs". It should also allow for this expansion by anyone, not just a certain set of developers. He reminds us what frameworks are for (to make life easier! remember?) and gives a warning to choose carefully which of them you choose to base your code on.