Michael Kimsal has pointed out a small irritation when using the Symfony framework and models - an issue when using models that have relationships.

If there are relations (an Author has a Book, for example). the generated forms will complain that the generated Models need a __toString() method to be used in the Form/View. In grails, this is the case, but every domain (corresponding to a Symfony 'model') has an implicit toString() method already generated, which return the string ":". For most production work, you'll want to override it with whatever you need the string to read, but for prototyping, it's fine.

He went in and modified the Symfony core to add in a __toString call that would return the object correctly. Several of the commentors agree with his frustration and some of the Symfony developers even chime in with some of the reasoning behind why it's like that.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post for those out there struggling with the small stuff. You've got the language down and you're learning the syntax, but there's still a few things that elude your grasp. If this is you, check out their list of "PHP Gotchas" to see if your problem is on there.

Included in their list of common problems for budding PHP developers are things like finding a "needle" in a string "haystack", working with constants, using and/or, and the __toString functionality in PHP5.