Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

Both Lukas Smith and Michael Kimsal are talking about a new project started up by the PHP development group to help provide more information to the users (and other developers) of the PHP language - the PHP.net wiki.

Michael comments:

This has been a long time coming and I'm glad to see it in place. I hope it will continue to help open up the development process to a larger audience. [...] This is definitely a large step for the project and I hope it'll get traction and become one of the key tools used to drive PHP forward.

And Lukas talks more about the planning behind the project:

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. [...] I am quite happy that we managed to get this far.

You can check out the wiki yourself at wiki.php.net.

David Coallier has posted about the progress that's already being made in the PHP Project - a new wiki that's been installed.

The wiki is of course not opened to everyone in the world (as wikis are usually a source of big mess) but only to developers that have any type of CVS access on the cvs.php.net server.

One of the first orders of business is moving the TODO list out from its current location and into the wiki, making it simple for anyone to check out what the language developers will be working on in the future.

Piggybacking on a recent proposal for traits in PHP, Lukas Smith has suggested something that could help make the organization of these sorts of contributions (and their "staying power") a bit more likely to happen - an official PHP.net wiki of sorts.

As such I really like what Stefan has done with his Traits proposal. Very nicely done. [...] Right now the RFC documents are hidden away in the unwieldy mailinglist archive and Stefan's private homepage, which could disappear any day. Of course there are also the various web archives, but what would be nice to have is a PHP.net wiki.

He notes that not only would this help protect information like this from dropping off the face of the web but it might also pave the way for some other changes to be made to the language (and to provide a space where everyone can share their ideas). He specifically mentions his wants for an array_merge_replace and a change to file_exists.

Chris Hartjes has posted about a new resource that he "cannot stop recommending people to use [it] when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems" - the CakePHP Cookbook.

With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It's a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there.

With the wiki in place, anyone can add to the communal CakePHP wisdom (or correct where others might have strayed) to make it a bigger and better resource for the whole range of CakePHP developers.

Sebastian Bergmann has pointed out the release of phpUnderControl by Manuel Picher - a tool to help with the integration of CruiseControl into your PHP project.

It integrates three of the best PHP development tools into CruiseControl, combined with an easy setup routine and a small example project.

Sebastian also points out that it can be used with the generated output of PHPUnit, the PHP_CodeSniffer package and the phpDocumentor utility.

You can find out more about phpUnderControl on its wiki page on the PHPUnit website.