PHP Weekly Reader - April 20th 2008

Judging by the number PHP of articles last week, spring is here. I can understand that since I find it extremely hard to focus on the computer screen when the weather is so beautiful, It almost hurt to write this article . I try to enjoy the spring while it lasts until the heat of summer arrives to drive me back inside, most summer days here will be over 100F well into the fall.

Respect

This seems to be a reoccurring theme lately — PHP and Respect. Its frustrating to read things that are not true written by people without real first hand knowledge and experience with the language. However, the reality is that good code is written by knowledgeable and skilled PHP developers and most impressively actually used on production sites the world over, To me you have earned respect when the code you write gets used by millions of users every day. Beautiful elegant solutions that never make it off of a development server and into the wild just don't matter. Fortunately I am entertained by mine is better than yours posts like this Why Ruby is better than Symfony just because they often get so many things wrong, and the response Response to Andy Jeffries why ruby is better than symfony.

How to

There were a lot of code snippets and how-to do its in my feed reader this last week. They aren't always the most authoritative or cutting edge examples but I am always surprised by the uses people can come up with for PHP and all the various web API's out there that are underused, and every once in a while you find a gem.

• Charts with PHP and Google Charts API — I love charts.
• XMPPHP A Jabber class for PHP — This looks like a lot of fun, and the one I have the least time to get caught up in playing with :(.
• Google RageRank in PHP — I can't think of anything I would use this for, but somebody somewhere is obsessing over their PR and needs this.
• Custom Digg Counter in Wordpress with PHP — Digg just gets on my nerves but that doesn't mean i won't need this someday for somebody.
• Map your users using the Google Maps API — Everybody likes to know where they are I guess.
• Caching PHP pages — If you need a quick introduction to html caching this article introduces a couple different existing solutions.
• SMTP legacy — Here is a tip that I know lots of code didn't take into consideration, especially the spammers that hit my mail box incessantly! At least spam me with something that works right.
• Widgetize This — If you use Wordpress this might be useful.

Phing

I use phing for automating my build process so I was very interested in these two articles. PHPUnit test and Code Coverage Statistics with phing and Simple Database migrations with phing and dbdeploy.

Zend Stuff

Compared to other frameworks there are way way more articles written on the Zend Framework, Since I don't use it I usually just skim over them. So for now I won't be writing much about Zend Framework specific articles. I will however post the links for those that do

• Zend Framework: Should Forms Save Themselves?
• Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine
• Zend Framework Articles and Tutorials
• Front Controller Plugins in Zend Framework

Books

Davey Shafik announced a new book on php streams due out in Q3 2008. Thats a topic I never thought there might be a book for. Ivo Jansch has a review for those interested in php|a’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework.

Oh and one more. I missed this one and had to stick it in here after I had finished the post for the week Review: PHP5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content.

Neat Stuff

I haven't installed this yet but I'm going to later on today.. its a pretty neat idea Google Toolbar button for PHP Reference, it lets you highlight text on a web page and search for that text on php.net. Oh yeah and this, everybody has probably already seen the SEO Wrapper but I just had to watch it again. How do people find the time?

Congrats

Congratulations are due to phpdeveloper.org on reaching 10K posts. It as one of the first resources I discovered when first starting with PHP.

Brian Moon just realized that phorum turned 10 last week. What is that about a billion years in internet time?

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