If you're a regular reader of PHPDeveloper.org, you know that there's a few articles posted here (almost) daily about what's happening in the PHP world. Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the quality content that's out there. In an effort to provide more PHP goodness to the community as a whole, PHP Quick Fix has been launched - a service linking to stories that don't make it on PHPDeveloper.org.

All of the stories on PHP Quick Fix (you can also follow it on twitter) are still hand-selected out of the mounds of PHP content that shows every day to ensure the best quality. There's no automatic syndication here - just more good, useful PHP (and related topics) to add to your day.

Additionally, if you're interested to see how it all works (thanks to a GimmeBar backend) check out this post on blog.phpdeveloper.org.

In a quick new post today Kevin Schroeder asks his readers for feedback on what programming rules you should always follow in your development practices.

Earlier today, more for my own interest, I asked the question on Twitter "What programming rules should you ALWAYS follow, regardless of the scenario you're working in?" In other words, are there programming rules that you ALWAYS should follow. It doesn't matter if it's a script to copy a bunch of files for a one time migration or if you're building the next Facebook (DON'T try to build the next Facebook. You will fail miserably. Build something else). In other words, what was the purist of programming rules.

Responses he received ranged from the simple to slightly more complex including:

• Always comment your code
• Test your code
• Use source control
• "Think. Think again. Then write code"
• Use a good debugger to help track down problems
• Make effective use of logging/output

PHPMaster.com has posted the first part of a new series they're presenting on working with OAuth in PHP, specifically using it to connect to the Twitter API. This first part of the series introduces you to the concepts of OAuth and some early code to work with user credentials.

A common complaint about OAuth is that it is very difficult to understand, but perhaps some of that confusion is because of an expectation that the abstraction provided by a third-party library will erase the need to understand the steps of an OAuth transaction - it does not. This two-part article demonstrates how OAuth v1 works by explaining the process of connecting a PHP application to the Twitter API using only a few built-in functions to post a message to a user's Twitter stream.

The process is broken up into two steps - first you'll need to set up the request credentials so your application can connect to the Twitter service (as created here) then use that connection to fetch the rest of the necessary credentials (three total: Consumer, Request and Access Credentials). Cut and pasteable code is provided.

In a new post Bertrand Mansion shows how he combined the versatility of the PEAR QuickForm2 package and the Bootstrap project from Twitter to quickly make a form using the project's styling (CSS).

I don't know about you, but for me building HTML Forms and styling HTML Forms are maybe the most boring things in web development. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to do things correctly. That's why tools like Twitter's Bootstrap and PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 can help with this part of our job. Wouldn't it be nice to have QuickForm2 generate a markup compatible with Bootstrap CSS, so that you could get a nice looking form without to much efforts? Well, that's what I plan to do here.

He starts by creating a simple QuickForm2 form with no renderers attached (no pre-defined styles) and a custom render callback that wraps the items in "div" tags with the correct styles. There's also a custom renderer included for grouping items with additional styling attached.

Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today asking "Why PHP?" - not so much a "why you should chose PHP for your development", more of a why PHP is the way it is.

Today on twitter there was a conversation going on about the responsiveness of the core PHP developers to PHP users. [...] This post isn't necessarily to correct perceived errors, to stand behind correct statements, or to state what I believe the problem is. Rather, it is to add something to the conversation that I don't think I've seen much of. The Twitter conversation was, for me, more of a contemplation kickoff and so the purpose of this post is to propose some thoughts for consideration. I don't have sufficient karma to propose changes directly, but I have bet my career on PHP and I want to see it beat the crap out of every language out there.

He points out that most of the opinions out there seem to be of the "what" PHP is rather than the "why" PHP is. He notes that the discussions about the core development (and developers) that's been happening recently is more of a symptom of a larger problem - an unclear definition as to what PHP is and what problem it's there to solve.

Ade Slade has written up a quick new post to his blog today showing how you can use the lightweight Silex framework to link your login with Twitter and validate users from their API.

For those not acquainted with Silex: Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP 5.3 A microframework provides the guts for building simple single-file apps. It's awesome. For the example, I've setup a virtual host of example.local on my development machine.

He includes the contents of the .htaccess you'll need to get the rewrite to work for Silex, a link to the OAuth extension you'll need to install for PHP and the code to make the login and auth routes. You'll need to create a Twitter application for your site to get the OAuth secret key to make the authentication work. You can see the complete code here.

In an effort to get some real feedback from the community about the state of PHP and what they think it needs, Sean Coates asked on Twitter for people to respond with their suggestions as to what could help make PHP better and what the project itself needs.

PHP's intentional stagnation is eating away at me. I'm working on a list of things I think #PHP needs. What's on your list? Tag it #phpneeds

There's been a great response already with suggestions ranging from features the language itself needs out to suggestions for those running and participating in the project. Keep this Twitter search bookmarked to see some of the great discussion.

Derick Rethans has posted the second part of his look at translating twitter as a part of his PHP-GTK Twitter client Haunt. Because of the deprecation route Google chose for its translation API, he needed a change to another service - the Bing Translation API.

A while ago I wrote in an article about translating tweets in my client Haunt. For the translating itself I was using the Google Translate API, which has sadly be deprecated. Evil after all I suppose. I've now rewritten my translation code to use the Bing Translation APIs instead. You need to register an API key (see http://www.bing.com/developers/appids.aspx) to be able to use the APIs. The APIs that I am using are fairly simple though.

Also included in the post is some sample code showing how to make the request to this new API and the results from the requests.

Freek Lijten has posted a great introduction to using OAuth in PHP via the PECL OAuth package.

If you're a webdeveloper and haven't heard of OAuth yet, you've been living under a rock. Apparently you moved though as you're reading this. In this article I'll try to explain the concept behind OAuth, give a quick overview of the technique behind it and give a real-world example using the Twitter API and a PECL package called OAuth.

He introduces you to some of the concepts behind OAuth, what it stands for and what problem it solves, and includes a graphic showing how a typical OAuth request happens. Next up is some code, a sample connection to an OAuth-based service to fetch a request token and apply it to your requests. His example makes a request to the Twitter API.

In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans mentions a new API wrapper he's developed to work with the Klout website (a site showing your "clout" on twitter).

In a previous tweet about playing with Klout and Twitter I talked about a project I am working on that mines Klout for interesting people. (Well, interesting to me) The main body of code remains procedural because...well because it works and it's not something I'm going to share so why bother cleaning it up. However parts of it may be useful to me in other projects. So I abstracted the Klout API into a class and have posted it for anyone who wants to use it.

His Klout wrapper for PHP (a github project) is largely procedural but gives you a good idea of how to talk to their API. Cal mentions some other things he's wanting to do with the script, but notes that it's ready for use now without any other changes. You can find out more about Klout on their website.