My previous post, The MicroPHP Manifesto, resulted in much excitement. In between fits of rage and crying, I found some time to answer folks questions, and also discuss the topic on the /dev/hell podcast with my cohost Chris Hartjes. To summarize and address some of the common questions, I felt I should write a small FAQ.

Questions asked so far include:

• So you think full-stack frameworks suck?
• You need a large framework to enforce best practices!
• You should check out my microframework!
• How do you choose what gets listed in the MicroPHP code collection?
• Why do you hate Rush?

If you have a question you don't see listed, drop him a note and he'll add to the post with more answers.

I've updated the old Oracle PHP FAQ and the Oracle PHP Troubleshooting FAQs that were hosted by Oracle Technology Network (OTN). We've redirected the old FAQ pages to a new wiki page: http://wiki.oracle.com/page/PHP+Oracle+FAQ with the updated content. Feel free to create an account and make updates. Hosting the FAQ on a wiki seems appropriate because PHP is open source and grows by the value of everyone's contributions.

Questions so far include some of the basics (connecting, querying, etc) and a few more complicated issues like pre-fetching, LOBS and new information for using the Zend Server to connect to your Oracle databases.

The format is a little bit different than a talk (thank god) and hopefully a lot more fun. Basically the presenter gets up there with twenty slides, each are going to be shown for exactly 20 seconds, for a total of six minutes forty seconds. No take backs, no do-overs, no boring slides full of code.

He tosses in a few FAQs for those interested (who can do it, what can it cover, etc) and who to contact to get yourself signed up - drop Elizabeth Naramore an email and let her know you're interested.

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The FAQ includes answers to lots of questions including:

• How to I get involved?
• What is the target audience?
• Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?
• What is the purpose of the membership fees?
• Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?
• Who decides on what emPHPower does?

After lots of questions recently on IRC about charsets and encodings, I decided to write up a FAQ about this. The FAQ can now be found in the article section of my website.

Questions answered include "What is the difference between unicode and UTF-8/UTF-16/...?" and "What does "multibyte charset/encoding" mean?" as well as topics like transliteration and character set support in PHP.

We now have an implementation of namespaces in PHP 6 HEAD, so here's a short FAQ about how they work for those that are too laz^H^H^Hbusy to read the whole README.namespaces.

It's an FAQ sort of list (quick questions and answers) with eleven questions that give an overview of what will be supported. This includes why they've been implemented, what some of the syntax is and looks like and how they can be used in files.

Also note namespaces are still work in progress, so it may happen it would be changed a lot when it's released.

New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.

They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.

Things are really starting to heat up for the PHP Throwdown contest. A number of updates have been released. Let me give you a quick rundown of them.

The updates include the setup of a subversion repository (along with login credentials for the teams), a FAQ that's been set up to help with common questions, and the prize list that's been posted. Be sure to stick with the PHP Throwdown site for the latest information.

• phpMyFAQ
• ODFaq
• Lethal Penguin's FAQMasterFlex
• All
• None

Be sure to check out this week's poll that asks which of the four options is the most common perspective regarding objects in PHP.

Choices for the poll were:

• Factory pattern
• Singleton pattern
• Observer Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Others

Be sure to check out and vote on this week's poll that asks, out of the given list of FAQ management applications, which does it the most effectively.