Juozas Kaziukenas has a new post to his blog with some tips and tricks for working with the Zend Framework including working with globals, using the framework part of the framework and getting form values a bit more correctly.

Most of the outlined problems and solutions are focused on testability, maintainability and other good code practices. If you are not familiar with them, I recommend read about them ASAP as there is big chance that you are doing those things described in this post and don't even realize how wrong they are. Believe me, you will soon find yourself a way better developer.

He also advocates splitting out logic and putting it into a model to make future enhancements easier (and make for cleaner code), avoiding the use of exit/die in your scripts and quick mentions of the includePaths setting in the application.ini file as well as things like addJavascriptFile/addStylesheet/addOnload.

In this new post from the Ibuildings techPortal today Michael shares some handy tips for working the date and time functions in PHP (all can be used in a non-PHP 5.3 installation).

His tips for these very handy functions include:

• A Unix timestamp is never timezone-specific; if you call time() at the same moment on computers in different time zones, you get exactly the same value back.
• The time string is interpreted as a local time; there is no gm- equivalent [of strptime], or even any way to simulate one, since it ignores the value of date_default_timezone_set. Note that you can impose a timezone on the input string if it contains a timezone abbreviation or offset.
• [With date/gmdate] as with strftime/gmstrftime, the gm- prefix affects whether the result is a representation of the time in the current timezone or in the UTC timezone.
• How does PHP know what your current timezone is? It tries a few different places, including the TZ environment variable and the date.timezone ini option.

On the NETTUTS.com site today there's a new tutorial with a few tips (six of them) for CodeIgniter sites to give them a bit of extra performance.

CodeIgniter is a simple and powerful open source web application framework for PHP. Today, we'll do some core "hacks" to this framework to change and improve its functionality. In the process, you'll gain a better understanding of the intricacies of CodeIgniter.

Thier six tips, while not the most idea for production systems (at least not until tested on a development site), can help out your application in a few different ways. Here's their list:

• Autoloading Models PHP 5 Style
• Prevent Model-Controller Name Collision
• Form Validation for Unique Values
• Running CodeIgniter from the Command Line
• Adding Doctrine ORM to CodeIgniter
• Running Multiple Sites

On the CatsWhoCode.com blog there's their list of top "hacks" for WordPress that can add that little extra boost your site might be needing.

2009 has been a very prolific year for WordPress hacks. In this article, I'll show you the most useful hacks I came across during the whole year. Enjoy!

Some of the suggestions include:

• Monetizing your old blog posts
• Detect the visitor browser within WordPress
• Get short urls for social bookmarking
• Use SSL on wp-admin directory
• Post on your WordPress blog using PHP

Richard Thomas focuses on the main configuration file in his latest Solar framework short (for the Solar framework) today, the Solar.config.php file.

While the subject might sound dark and scary the reality is the Solar Frameworks config system is one of the things that I truly enjoy about Solar 99% of the time. Its that other 1% you need to be aware of to keep yourself out of the rabbit hole.

The notes that, which the configuration file can start out simple (and easy to access inside you application), strange things can happen when you try to access unset values or properties. Defaults can be used and confusion can happen. He also touches on database configuration confusions and how it can all work with your environments (development/qa/production).

Brandon Savage has posted a set of five tips on how you can make your object-oriented code work better and be easier to maintain in the long run.

Last week, I did a talk at the Frederick Web meetup about tips and tricks for improving your object-oriented code. A lot of these tips were adapted from a fabulous presentation by Stefan Priebsch but the ideas are by no means original to him, and they're exceptionally good ideas when you're talking about object-oriented code. Slides are at the end of this blog post, and I'm happy to do this talk over again for local groups.

His list of five is:

• Use Objects. Lots of Objects
• Use Interfaces To Make APIs Predictable
• Use Dependency Injection
• Composition Over Inheritance
• Create Loosely Coupled Classes

Daniel Cousineau has posted a quick guide to migrating database information with Doctrine:

I was talking with someone [...] here at ZendCon and discovered that they were having trouble with migrations in Doctrine. Having gone through the same issues of Doctrine seemingly not being able to figure out your changes and generate migration classes, I thought I'd post the solution here for future reference.

It's four quick steps that'll get Doctrine to automatically generate the differences (deltas) and upgrade your models to reflect these changes.

In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage takes a look at five different functions for working with arrays you can do some pretty cool things with:

Time and time again, I come across code that contains a variety of array-handling functions that too often duplicate the work that the PHP core team has done to develop built-in array functions. Since the built-in functions are inherently faster, trying to reimplement them in PHP will inevitably be a performance problem.

The five functions he covers are:

• array_key_exists
• usort
• array_pop
• aray_merge
• array_rand

Brandon Savage has a new post to his blog today with a few tips on some "micro" optimizations you can make to your PHP applications to improve performance and make for better maintainability.

Micro optimization doesn't work. So why, then, is this post called "micro optimizations that matter"? The optimizations below could be described as micro - not in the little amounts of performance improved, but in the very minute (if any) changes required to your code to make use of them. All of these optimizations are standard optimizations you should consider, and all of them will offer considerable performance enhancements.

Instead of the usual tips that might save you a millionth of a second here and there, Brandon suggests some smaller things like caching data, removing manual error logging, using a CDN and adding in an autoloader.

Whether you're coming to ZendCon or any other conference in the near future, Keith Casey has posted a few suggestions you should read up on before attending. They can help you get the most out of your conference-going experience.

So, it's your first conference. Yes, it can be a little intimidating. Yes, it will be exciting. Yes, it will be exhausting. Here are some tips to get you started.

His tips include:

• Do look at the schedule to find your "must see" sessions
• Don't be a starstruck fanboy
• Don't try to sell anyone anything
• Do follow up after the conference

Check out the rest of the post for more great tips on getting the most from your conference of choice.