In this new post to his blog Sameer Borate applies an interesting method of discovery of structure in unfamiliar code - generating code signatures.

One method [Ward Cunningham] suggests is that of summarizing on a single line select punctuation characters from each source file. He calls this the file's "signature". This will help the developer gauge the complexity of the code base.

He includes a few examples from files in WordPress - looking for the structure of curly braces and semicolons as delimiters for chunks of functionality. Included are a few lines of code to help you generate a signature from any file and an example of a result. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how practical it is. It could be a helpful reference for how complicated the file is, though.

On the WebInsightLab.com blog there's a new post with a long list (30 to be exact) of PHP-based content management systems besides WordPress that you could select from for your next project.

Yes, there are many CMS available for your website, most of them are Open Source. You can not only use them but may modify too according to your need but under GNU license. [...] Now move on to other PHP Based Open Source CMS, following list shows you 30 Open Source CMS besides WordPress which can be useful to build your website and manage your content.

Other content management systems that made their list include:

• Pluck
• Active CMS
• Automne
• concrete5
• Diem
• Dynamix

Each one on the list comes with a brief description of what it offers and where it comes from.

In this recent post to Theme.fm they have a guide to deploying your WordPress site (or really any sort of PHP-driven site) with Capistrano. There's some WordPress specific bits in there, but it's a good overall guide to deployment with this handy tool.

I'm not a Capistrano expert (yet) and in this post I'll try to give you an overview how to set it up and how to deploy WordPress applications (websites) in seconds. We'll work with only one server today but the principles in deploying to two or more are pretty much the same.

He starts by introducing Capistrano and talking about some of the major benefits it can bring to you and your project (most importantly - simple deployments). The tutorial helps you install Capistrano and get it set up to work with your Github repository to pull the source. The WordPress specific bit has to do with configuration files and suggests an "if" check to see if there's local config first. Also included are the updates you'll need to make to the Capistrano config file and the commands to push the latest as well as rollback to your previous version.

On NetTuts.com today there's a guide to help you create WordPress plugins with object-oriented code instead of procedural method. This means better encapsulation, reusability and more maintainable code.

Object-oriented code, among other things, can help organize and add reusability to your code. In this tutorial, I will teach you the basics of writing a WordPress plugin using object oriented techniques. We'll be using Dribble's API as an example for this tutorial.

They walk you through a brief explanation of OOP in WordPress plugins, setting up a shortcode, making a template tag and enabling this shortcode in the WordPress widgets. Their example grabs the latest shots from Dribble with a getImage() method that fetches the results from their REST API.

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to deploy your WordPress blog to the cloud, more specifically to the cloud services Amazon offers.

For the last decade, hosting a large scale web application has been a daunting task, reserved only for experts. Not anymore; when Amazon opened its server architecture, everything changed. Computer hardware moved to the cloud, and became available to any and all developers. In this tutorial, we will install WordPress in the cloud.

They walk you through all the steps you'll need - from setting up an AWS account, starting up your first instance and installing the needed server software. It comes complete with screenshots. They also show you how to set up the database and how to pull down the latest WordPress and configure it for use.

In a new post to his blog Ruslan Yakushev points out a new build of WinCache (the Windows caching tool for PHP) that makes life easier for WordPress users who want it to be able to to the auto-upgrade correctly.

The WinCache extension 1.1 for PHP has been released last year. Since then several customers reported a bug in the extension that prevents WordPress and other PHP applications from performing automatic upgrades or their plugins. This was reported on WordPress forum as well as on WinCache forum. The new build of WinCache with the fix for this problem is available now at the following location: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wincache/files/development/

He asks for feedback if things still don't work - either as a comment in the WinCache forum or as a bug to the PECL database. This will help them improve the support in future releases and make it even easier for those running WordPress on Windows to keep their sites running smoothly.

Kevin Schroeder has a recent post to his blog showing how he integrated Zend_View into a WordPress install for his blog. It was as a part of a plugin he uses on some of his internal pages.

I just read a blog post about integrating Zend Framework and WordPress and figured I'd add some commentary of my own, since I've done something similar. In my ESchrade plugin I use Zend_View to render some of my admin pages, though there is no reason why you couldn't use it elsewhere, as long as the plugin has already been loaded.

Adding the functionality is easy as long as the Zend Framework install is in your include path. He gives some sample code that creates the view object, defining the templates path and pulling in the "wp_register_sidebar_widget" WordPress method to import the view.

Kevin Schroeder has a quick post to his blog talking about the integration of job queuing he's done with his WordPress blog to build a list of popular posts for his sidebar.

One of the things I liked on my old blog was the ability to have a Popular Posts section that was based off of Google Analytics. [...] So I had missed that, but it was not overly important so I left it. But yesterday was a day where I needed something that was both engaging and brainless to do. So I decided to implement my Job Queue API code for WordPress so that I could write a WordPress widget that would put the popular posts in the sidebar.

He's created a plugin to handle most of the heavy lifting for you.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new post from Craig Buckler for the WordPress users out there. The HTML that this popular blog/CMS tools spits out can sometimes be not-so-semantic. Craig shares a tip on cleaning up one aspect of it - the methods returning lists for menus or sitemaps.

love WordPress. I also love clean semantic HTML. Unfortunately, several of the standard WordPress theme functions return code that is a little untidy. For me, the primary culprits are wp_list_pages() and the newer wp_nav_menu(); both return an unordered list of page links.

He gives an example of a sample list generated by wp_nav_menu() that's full of badly formatted and unnecessary elements. To help fix the issue, he shares his regular expression-based call to strip out things like extra tabs, empty classes and all title attributes. Obviously you can customize this as you need, but it's a good start towards something that's a bit cleaner and up to code.

Rob Allen has posted a method he's come up with for displaying an RSS feed right in with the rest of the content of your WordPress blog. The key is in the simplicity of the MagpieRSS library.

My wife decided that she wanted to display a list of her latest AudioBoos in the sidebar of her blog. She looked at the AudioBoo JavaScript widget but decided it wasn't subtle enough and so she enlisted me to solve her problem. It turns out that AudioBoo has an RSS feed, so a simple plugin was required. I had a quick look on the extension site, but most are now "widgets" which her theme isn't set up for or didn't provide an unsigned list. Hence, I whipped up a small extension for her.

With the help of Magpie, a simple call to "fetch_rss" was all it took to pull in the AudioBoo RSS feed and a bit of PHP to loop through it and pull out the relevant bits. They're all displayed in a simple list - you can see it in action on her blog (look for the "Audioboo Updates" section).