Two weeks ago I attended phpvikinger in Skien. I have been on vacation so I have not had time to blog about this event.

For me the event was very insightfull. Derick has already written a very nice wrapup.

Personally I liked Kores introduction to CouchDb and his phpillow wrapper framework.

So thanks to all that participated at phpvikinger!

At a barbeque party after the ezConference this year I started a social experiment in the PHP/ez community. Will the community help out Josh and Max at VisionWT so that they can get their espresso at work?

If you want to read the story behind it, see the signatures I got at the party (scanned as pdf) or sign the petition yourself head over to bjartek.org/espresso.

Mike Bernat is a big fan of XDebug and has posted about why he thinks installing it is the best decision you'll ever make.

I finally got around to installing Xdebug on my development environment and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread. Installation was a breeze and the information it provides when something has gone wrong is incredibly helpful during debugging.

He explains what the software does, how it can help you and your development - even how to get it up and running on your PHP install (seriously, it's drop dead easy...why haven't you installed it yet?). He also points to the tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone introdu ......

On the SaniSoft blog Tarique Sani has posted about (and made available for download) some code sniffs for the CakePHP framework. Some problems arose with some of the naming that the framework uses, but with some "tinkering around"...

[It became] apparent that I had to have my own set of Cake sniffs to manage this but a separate standard just for this seemed an over kill and the simplicity of code made it kind of fun to add more standards which I liked but were in different set of sniffs.

You can grab the whole list of sniffs from their downloads. They implemented them as a pre-commit hook on their SVN server even so that developers could not violate the coding standards when they submit their code.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

Doug Brown has posted a new entry to his blog about how the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework has saved him some money.

He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

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On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for ......

Stefan Priebsch recently posted about his struggles with creating a custom coding started with the PHP_CodeSniffer package:

In CodeSniffer, a coding standard is basically represented by an empty class that extends PHP_CodeSniffer_Standards_CodingStandard. I could not get the CodeSniffer to find my coding standard, though, and found the documentation lacking about where to put it, how to name it, and how to refer to it in the --standard switch.

After an email to Greg Sherwood (developer of the package) Stefan figured out his issue and has shared the solution in this post (st ......

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
  
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
  
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month
  

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.

According to the PHP::Impact blog, the PHP-based replacement for Twitter has finally arrived - identi.ca.

Identi.ca is a microblogging service. Users post short (140 character) notices which are broadcast to their friends and fans using the Web, RSS, or instant messages. It runs on the Free Software Laconica tool.

If you'd like to give it a shot you can register for an account of your own and start posting. It also supports OpenID authentication.

MySQLs multiple-queries feature makes it possible to run two or more SQL commands with one function call: SQL injections made easy. The PDO design is said to be optimized for security. For security reasons PDO has gone the stony road of prepared statements. If security matters, why does PDO_MYSQL explicitly ...

This blog posting is in German as the event it relates to is German-only. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working towards an English edition of the PHP Code Camp, though.

Nach der großen und sehr positiven Resonanz auf die beiden ersten PHP Code Camps in München und Berlin findet die nächste Veranstaltung vom 8. bis zum 11. September in Zürich statt.

Das innovative und neuartige Trainingskonzept des Camps enthält die Essenz aus den Praxis-Erfahrungen und den Spezialgebieten von drei der bekanntesten deutschsprachigen PHP-Profis. Das bietet Ihnen den Vorteil, dass Sie tiefgehendes Know-how von den führenden Experten jedes Themengebiets vermittelt bekommen. Sie werden stets gleichzeitig von mindestens zwei Trainern (meistens aber von allen dreien) individuell betreut – ideal für praktische Ü ......

Some weeks months ago I finally got my hands on the ThoughtWorks Anthology and got immediately hooked on one of the featured essays called 'Refactoring Ant Build Files' contributed by Julian Simpson aka the build doctor. After absorbing and studying the provided catalogue of overall 24 refactorings, I spent some time to transform a few health-promoting ones to the Phing universe. So the following post will outline six five basic, but valuable Phing build file refactorings by showing the smelly example first, followed by the scentless one and a closing refactoring description.

Making build files 'first-class' codebase citizens

You might ask yourself if there even is any need to refactor and care about mostly poorly treated project artifacts like build files. Well according to the bo ......