On PHPBuilder.com there's a recent post showing you how to connect your application with Facebook's graph API and grabbing the current user's public profile information.

In recent years, [Facebook's] influence has dramatically grown thanks to the Facebook Platform, a set of APIs which third-parties can use to create or extend applications which tightly integrate with Facebook.com's features and users. [...] PHP-minded developers are particularly fortunate, as the Facebook PHP SDK doesn't only provide users a powerful solution for interacting with the social graph, but because it's actively maintained by the Facebook development team is often the first of several available APIs to offer the latest features and bug fixes.

He points out the github repostory for grabbing the Facebook SDK, the information you'd get (at a minimum) from the API and the sort of detail you can expect from a user logged into your application. Sample code is included for this last example.

New on his blog Phil Sturgeon has a post about the social integration package PHP has been dying for - NinjAuth. It has hooks for OAuth and OAuth2 connections and makes it simple to use them completely abstracted.

In the past I have never needed to implement oAuth into a PHP project. I have done it in Rails and boy it was easy thanks to OmniAuth. OmniAuth abstracts away so much of the grunt work that it takes about 5 minutes to add a new social network to your site, and 4 of those minutes are spent signing up for the API keys. What options do we have in the world of PHP? A bunch of screwy hacks or provider specific classes like TwitterOAuth. I don't want to hunt down 20 libraries with different methods, I want to get a key, bang it in and go to the pub. Well, now I can!

The fuel-oauth and fuel-oauth2 packages to drive its backend. He includes a code snippet showing how to configure the providers (complete with keys needed for auth) including Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, YouTube and - of course - Twitter. You can grab the latest version of this library from Phil's github account.

Timothy Boronczyk has a new post to his blog proposing something that any veteran developer already knows - "spaghetti code" is harmful to the health of your application. He's done a little research, though, and tried to explore what this "bad code" really is.

The phrase "spaghetti code" is an all-too-common pejorative we programmers use to describe horrible code, whether it's difficult to understand, poorly organized, or just plain long-winded. And there-in lays the problem. What really constitutes spaghetti code is subjective; I've yet to hear a concrete definition or standard metric that measures it. [...] Everyone has his or her own opinion as to what aspects would make them label it spaghetti.

Suggested definitions include: quickly written, non-standardized, beginner-level quality and any code that makes use of "goto". He suggests that applying the term to someone's code is less about the real quality of the code and more about social aspects of not wanting to upset the other developer over its quality.

But besides negatively affecting others, our complaining about spaghetti code hurts ourselves too. It's easier to motivate ourselves when tasked with fixing a bug when we're not dreading having to trudge through spaghetti. When we label code as spaghetti code, we are actually creating roadblocks that hamper ourselves and artificially increase the difficulty of the task at hand.

If you're attending this year's Dutch PHP Conference, they've just posted an important announcement about the conference social:

The conference social will now take place at a venue called ClubNL, which is also in central Amsterdam and within easy walk from the Amsterdam main train station. Please remember to hold on to your conference badge, as you will need it to gain access to the event. For more details check out the updated social page on our website. We are hoping to see you all there!

There's still time for you to get your tickets to this great event happening in a few weeks (May 19th-21st) in Amsterdam - full event tickets run 695 Euro and the single-day tickets (just tutorial or just conference day) are 375 Euro. Get yours today!

The Dutch PHP Conference has posted an update about the conference today including changes to the schedule and how its represented on the site.

t has been about two weeks since the schedule was published and ticket sales started, but that doesn't mean we haven't done anything in the meantime! There have been a number of updates on both the site and the schedule.

There's five new talks that've been added to the schedule including Paul Matthews' presentation on Solr, Chris Jones talking about high performance PHP apps and David Soria Parra on git. The site updates mainly revolve around the classification of the different sessions - icons added to show skill level and scope of the presentation. There's also an update about the unconfernece and official conference social.

Chris Hartjes has posted his review of the Packt Publishing book "PHP 5 Social Networking" they had asked him to review.

I'm glad I decided to take a look at this book. It's pretty dense at 450+ pages, but it really does work you through from start to finish how to build a small social networking site in PHP. Okay, it's about dinosaurs, but let's not quibble. I'm not into long-depth book reviews, so we can talk about what I liked about this book.

He likes the consistency of the book's approach to the subject and points out that it promotes refactoring and improving code over striking out and using something new and trendy. He also mentions their emphasis on security. The one thing he didn't like about the book was a simple one - there were no unit tests to back up any of the code in the book.

Lorna Mitchell has posted the last of three articles with tips for those hosting tech events out there from her past experiences with conferences like the Dutch PHP Conference.

This is the final post in a short series about hosting events, based purely on my own experience and no specific expertise, in the hope that they will be useful to others doing similar things. If you are interested, you can read the first two posts, about preparing for the event and what to do on the day. This post is about some of the additional things about an event; sharing the content afterwards, getting feedback from attendees, and the most important bit - the social event.

She talks about the importance of getting slides (and recordings, if possible) from each of the sessions as this can add to the post-event experience, especially for those that weren't able to attend. She notes that feedback during and after the conference is key and has a few tips for the social events that might happen in the evenings for the attendees.

Those attending the PHP Benelux conference (coming up soon!) will be happy to know that Ibuildings will be sponsoring an evening social event.

The official conference social event is taking place right after the main conference, in the exhibition/lunch room of the conference. We are very grateful for Ibuildings to have stepped up to support us in organizing this conference, and especially also the social event! Thanks to them, everyone will be able to let off some steam when the conference is over. We'll have two hours of free drinks and some snacks for everyone who feels like hanging out.

There will also be a pre-conference social time at DeVagant. You can find out more about the conference here (and here). Unfortunately, the conference has already sold out, so there'll be no more tickets at this time.

In a new post to her blog Anna Filina looks at another side of conferences (technology or otherwise, really) besides just the usual goal of attending every session that sounds interesting. As she suggests, conferences are also a great place for networking.

There are many networking events, but I find that the best ones are Web conferences. It is where you meet other geeks like you, book publishers, great contacts at some of the biggest companies, contributors to your favorite open source projects, potential start-up partners and the list goes on.

She touches on a few topics to consider when coming at the conference from a networking angle - why you should care, how to make the time to really get to meet and know people, keeping track of those you meet and whether or not the conference organizers care about the networking environment (hint, they do).

On the WebReference.com site there's a review recently posted about a PHP-based content management system - a system targeted more towards creating social networking sites than just generic content management.

This CMS has everything a developer needs to create a top of the line social networking site with all the features that users have come to expect from sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. [...] Understand that, unlike Elgg, Drupal, Joomla and Dolphin, phpFox is not Open Source (although it is written in PHP). It sells for $300 for a full license, which includes 6 months of free upgrades and support, or you can purchase a monthly license for $39.95, which includes free upgrades and support for each month that is purchased. While $300 may seem like a lot when there are other social networking software packages available for free, as they say, you get what you pay for.

The reviewer goes on to talk about the installation of the software, modules included, core features and some of the more updated, included features like a marketplace module, profile photo cropping, spam filtering, privacy settings for each user and a video module.