The Nettuts site has posted a detailed guide to the "comments.php" file that comes with every release of WordPress:

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it's no wonder with it's ease of use and ease of customization. In this tutorial, I'll be dissecting the default WordPress theme's comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier.

The guide breaks down the major parts of the file - some of the general code, how it displays comments, the comment submission form and some "little tricks" it does to handle things like comment numbers, links and the alternating colors.

Adam Trachtenberg has posted, according to this new item on his blog, the slides from his presentation at this year's OSCON. The title of the talk? "Dirty Secrets of PHP 5's ext/soap Extension."

The slides [pdf] summarizes his talk, described as:

PHP 5's ext/SOAP extension is an excellent web services client. However, while the easy things are easy, lack of documentation means the hard things can appear downright impossible. Starting with SOAPClient basics and building upwards, learn the hidden secrets necessary to conquer even the strangest WSDL.

In the presentation, he not only describes the functionality the PHP 5 extension offers, but provides a few simple code examples to help with the explaination.

In the spirit of the holiday, Mike Naberezny has his own take on the whole "simplicity" and "clean code" arguments between the different camps (PHP/Python/Ruby) and gives an example of a simple way PHP can handle your Secret Santa needs.

Today, I ran across Ruby Secret Santa. I couldn't help but think to myself, "That's sort of nice looking but wow, for a little thing like Secret Santa, how much overkill is that?" Here's the same thing in PHP, minus the database fetch (add it in two lines).

That's less than half the code. I think this is a fair comparison because it directly compares PHP to Ruby, without any "frameworks" or other middleware in between. Which one do you think is extremely simple?

I like how he puts it as well:

I think that Rails is a phenomenal tool, but it's tooling '" not a language. I am sure that great tools will come for PHP as well, and that PHP itself will always be a language that is both highly productive and high performance. Do you Yahoo!?