Think of plugins as components where you put your functionality and widgets as components of your user interface. Building your own WordPress plugins and widgets will make your blog truly original, and all you need is basic PHP and HTML knowledge - and your imagination.

They help you get started with defining a few constants, registering the actions with WordPress, building the widget (with complete cut-and-paste-able code) and including it in your WordPress blog. You can download the complete source if you want to get started quickly.

Zend Framework is always considered as being the slow/bloated one. I don't think this is right, so I decided to prove that it's not correct and in fact ZF is as good as other frameworks are. This post doesn't cover any benchmarks though; this is more like a architecture review and some misconceptions disproof.

He counters the following with a bit of logic that makes the points a bit more shaky than they first seem:

• Large installation footprint
• Unnecessary features
• Use more system resources

If you're still not convinced, he offers two other tips to help streamline your Zend Framework install - profiling to find the bottlenecks and using Zend_Application sparingly as it can be a bit of a resource problem.

EllisLab today announces changes to our internal development processes, including dropping Subversion in favor of Mercurial and adopting Assembla as our agile software development management tool. Along with these changes, CodeIgniter 2.0 pre-release code is in development, and is now hosted at the Mercurial-focused social coding site BitBucket.

They also talk about their move to the Scrum method of software development and how this (and their change of version control system) can help the future of CodeIgniter (version 2.0) come even sonoer through contributed updates and bugfixes made much simpler through the features of BitBucket (similar to Github). If you'd like to contribute, you can follow the CodeIgniter project and get busy contributing back to this great framework.

This video should help you build your own composite Zend_Form element. We'll be building a phone element. The phone element will have 3 textboxes, one for geographic location, area code and local code. In the following videos will add a custom cell phone validator and some ajax validation.

You can grab a copy of the source if you'd like to follow along or you can just look around the repository to find the source for this and other great lessons from the site.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

In this talk these and more comparisons will be drawn between the two languages. The main weaknesses and strengths of JavaScript will be discussed and compared to PHP. Examples will be given of closures and lambda functions in JavaScript and they will be compared to the implementation of these same features in the upcoming PHP 5.3. And through comparison the speaker will demonstrate that the two languages are quite similar.

To listen you can either use the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly and listen offline at your leisure.

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it's built, and answer your questions about the new release.

The webinar will be happening this coming Wednesday, March 17th, at 9am PST and will be happening via WebEx. Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Ralph Schindler will be talk about the new features, current functionality that was enhanced and will answer your burning questions. To reserve your spot, head over to the registration page and enter your info.