On the Symfony blog there's a recent post from David Herrmann looking at how to run a TV station (well, its website at least) using the Symfony framework on top of a few other various technologies.

When I (David Hermann) joined OktoLab in mid-2008, we had to face some serious challenges. The previous (and at that time only) developer had abandoned the company at short notice and left a mess of various software services that were either loosely or not at all coupled. [...] This situation was not caused by the developer, it was a result of the evolution of the company. The situation had gotten out of hand though, so there was a huge pressure to improve it.

His choice of framework for this new software tool was, obviously, Symfony and he combined it with some javascript/ajax, working with the external-facing APIs the other data sources had and what all of his work got for him and the company - a 30% drop in how long it took to get things done.

Eli White has an interesting new post about the PHP community and the conferences/presentations associated with it. According to his commentary, it's being done wrong and not quite how other communities/companies do it.

The PHP 'conference circuit' if you will, is one that has grown up in a different manner than other conference circuits that I've been familiarized with in the past (Java, Adobe, 'Web', etc). In most of these other areas, the speakers are PAID to attend. [...] On the flip side, in the PHP conference circuit, every speaker there, in fact, is PAYING for the right to attend that conference and be a part of it.

He talks about the fact that speakers will have more than just the cost of the conference to worry about. In fact, sometimes they can all add up to more than the conference would have cost them normally.

In the end, my point is this. I feel that given the nature of all of these conferences. That the organizers and attendees need to understand the situation and treat the speakers not as a '˜professional speaker that they paid good money to see'. But as what they really are. Far more akin to an Open Source Developer, who is donating their time for the better good and education of the masses.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Ivo Jansch takes a look at a type formatter they've created to work with Zend Studio to more correctly format your code as per the official coding standard for the Zend Framework.

One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we've found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio.

If you're a Zend Studio user and want to get a little less frustrated at the formatting it uses for your applications, download the tool and follow the instructions in the post to get it working in your IDE.

On NETTUTS.com there's a (quite complete) tutorial posted that walks you through the creation of a forum using PHP and MySQL as a backend to store the posts.

In this tutorial, we're going to build a PHP/MySQL powered forum from scratch. This tutorial is perfect for getting used to basic PHP and database usage.

They start with the backend and move their way forward, setting up the MySQL tables - categories, replies, users and topics. They describe each of them in a bit more detail before getting into the code. They show how to create template for the site (with a little CSS) and include code to create users, authenticate them, set up their permission levels, making categories/topics and much more.

The full code for the forum application they've created can be downloaded here.

On the InsicDesigns blog there's a new tutorial on using the MiMViC framework

MiMViC is a modular and lightweight PHP 5.3+ Web application framework designed to help build dynamic and robust Web sites. It's theory is based on minimal and framework emphasizes on only core glue for your complex PHP web sites. Today I will show you how to create a shout-box using the MiMViC framework. It won't take you more than 15 mins to get the job done and have friendly URLs as well.

Sample code for the "shoutbox" is included. Their example shows an Apache setup and a MySQL backend (complete with namespace-enabled code). A simple form to take in a "shout" works directly with the framework to save the information quickly and easily.

Recently Brandon Savage has been really getting into the Zend Framework and creating applications with it. He, like many other developers just starting out with this framework, has had his share of frustrations. In the latest post to his blog Brandon looks at some of these first steps and what he's learned from them.

This immersion experience [into the Zend Framework] has brought out a few thoughts and lessons that I've learned through the process about how to get into a framework, how to start a new project using a framework you've never used before, and the best way to learn without losing your sanity.

He's broken it up into a few points with some good explanation of each:

Don't fight the framework.
• A little knowledge can be very dangerous.
• Learn when and where to ask for help.
• Have patience.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a new post from Soila Patajoki about a white papers they've developed covering continuous integration and how it relates to PHP applications.

This new white paper discusses the policies and systems that together make up Continuous Integration. It explains how Continuous Integration can allow your teams to build projects faster and cheaper, and also covers several best of breed tools for PHP-based companies to use to implement such a system.

The PDF download is free, but you'll need to give up a little personal information to get to it. The white papers covers topics like source code control, regression testing and tools like PHPUnit, Phing and phpDocumentor.

• Elizabeth Smith's Blog: Xdebug, Thread Safety, and PHP 5.3
• Davey Shafik's Blog: PHP IDEs (Comparison)
• Robert Basic's Blog: Wordpress as CMS tutorial
• Frank Wu's Blog: Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter
• Matt Curry's Blog: 8 Ways to Speed Up CakePHP Apps
• NETTUTS.com: How to Build a Super Duper News Scroller
• Ant Phillips' Blog: Integrating SAP NetWeaver in Zero PHP
• Rob Allen's Blog: UTF8, PHP and MySQL
• PHPBuilder.com: Building a time-tracking and billing application with Adobe AIR and PHP
• Jamie Hammett's Blog: Open ID edit one page on Wordpress
• Federico Cargnelutti's Blog: Domain-Driven Design (Series)
• PHP in Action: Real programming with PHP 5.3 (part 1): array processing
• Blue Parabola Blog: Coding Standard Analysis using PHP_CodeSniffer
• Quinton Parker's Blog: Try-catch suppress?
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: Quality Assurance Tools for PHP

On the P'unk Avenue blog there's a recent post from Tom Boutell looking at optimizing PHP applications and how you can cope with the possibility of "Serious Traffic" that might come your way.

PHP is easy...as programming languages go, that is. You can build sites in a real hurry. [...] Still, sooner or later success catches up with you and you want your site to cope with Serious Traffic...or cope with moderate traffic on a cheap virtual machine...or at the very least, not be dog-slow with just a handful of users on the system.

He mentions things that can slow down the application (like timeouts on web server connections or not optimizing the site with a "thin" server for non-PHP requests). He mentions the alternative PHP cache (APC) as one possible way to help, some tips on making your Apache server more efficient and pushing those lighter requests off to a smaller, built-for-speed server using FastCGI.

Recently on his blog Jack Diederich took a look at three different interpreters for Ruby, PHP and Python to see how they were implemented as compared to the language they're used in.

The other day I went poking around the Ruby and PHP interpreters (the current stable versions). I hadn't looked inside PHP since the 4.x series and Ruby I had never checked out. Like CPython the internals of both PHP and Ruby look something like their resulting language, but in C. For each interpreter I just compiled it and looked at how core types and extension types were implemented.

For PHP, he went with the PHP 5.2.13 release and talks about the compile process (a bit spammy), running the unit tests that come included and how the interpreter handles data types, core types and objects.