PHPClasses.org has posted the latest episode (#34) of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series. In this episode they talk about the current PHP voting process for features and a possibly better one that was proposed.

This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Cesar Rodas on the episode 34 of the Lately in PHP podcast. They also discussed about the latest PHP releases, updating PHP with minimized downtime, as well how brilliant are some developers for creating pure PHP components that overcome PHP limitations without upgrading to a newer PHP version.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed. If you'd like to see the video recording of the session you can check that out over on YouTube.

With some of the recent talk about the consistency of naming methods in PHP (or lack thereof) Phil Sturgeon has put together some ideas about why this (and unicode) changes aren't happing in the language.

PHP is well known for having an inconsistent API when it comes to PHP functions. Anyone with an anti-PHP point of view will use this as one of their top 3 arguments for why PHP sucks, while most PHP developers will point out that they don't really care. [...] Another big thing that anti-PHP folks laugh about is the lack of scalar objects, so instead of $string->length() you have to do strlen($string). ANOTHER thing that people often joke about is how PHP 6.0 just never happened, because the team were trying to bake in Unicode support but just came across so many issues that it never happened.

He shares an "obvious answer" to the problems and shares a theory as to why it's not happening - that no one is really working on out (outisde of this POC) and some of the handling with the recent property accessors RFC. He finishes off the post with three more points, all related to the results of the voting - little points seem to get voted in easier, the representation of developers in the process and that at least one of the "no" votes had to do with not wanting to maintain the results.

Making changes to this language should not be blocked just because a quiet minority of the core team don't like the idea of being asked to do stuff.

Be sure to check out the comments on the post - there's lots of them, so be sure you have some good time to read.

As is mentioned in this new post to PHPMaster.com, the PHP standards group is officially in the voting process on two new standards (PSR-0 being the first) setting up some standard development practices for PHP applications - PSR-1 and PSR-2.

They initially started out as one proposal but the initial round of voting didn't yield a majority in favor. Participants did however see merit in various requirements the decision was made to split it into 2 proposals - one for mandatory interoperability and one for suggested style.

The PSR-1 standard proposes some basic coding standards (like namespacing structure and class/method naming definitions) and the PSR-2 standard covers similar things, but more in-depth with more recommendations.

If you want to find out how your application stacks up against this new standard, you can try out PHP-CS-Fixer (from Fabien Potencier) to see how many things need an update.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the voting state of the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards has officially started and you can cast your vote in one of many categories (and maybe win a prize for your efforts).

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.