I wanted to get your thoughts on them and on an idea I'm considering - splitting them off into their own sub-site sort of thing. Right now, you can go to jobs.phpdeveloper.org and get to the latest job postings without the news items. Do you, opinionated readers, think that they should stay over there and not be included with the news? Or do you like having them all in one place, all in one feed?

Post your opinions in the comments - I'll be interested to see what you think...

UPDATE: Several people in the comments have mentioned it, but I wanted to point out one option on the RSS feed - the filtering I have built in. It's tag based, so if you didn't want the job posts in there, you could subscribe to this feed: http://phpdeveloper.org/feed/tag/-job-post. That filters out the job posts for you. It wouldn't be hard to translate this into another "jobless" feed.

With other programming languages designed for the web, there's typically a framework that works hand in hand. [...] I imagine people will always write from the ground up with PHP, some people do it to learn, some I suspect think there's nothing out there that can do what they want, where as others perhaps do it just to prove themselves, or to gain fame. Good luck to them all, some of them are probably going to do a good job, but alas - I imagine most are wasting their time.

He breaks his opinions out into two sides of the argument - the business issues and the developer side, each with their own plusses and minuses. Overall, though, he definitely suggests learning some kind of framework, even if you don't end up working with it - it's just good experience.

Well, there's a patch available, but 2/3 of the active PHP committers (who participated in the vote) voted against its inclusion. However, of the end-users participating in the discussion, 17 out of 20 voted in favor. Shortly before the voting was concluded, there was a call for some user-land input, so I decided to humbly submit my two pennies.

His comments support the idea, noting that arrays are "our bread and butter" for the language and should be updated to make them even easier to use (and more in line with the declarations of other variable types).

I've been asked on the forum about my preferences in frameworks and I wrote a few thoughts about it.

These comments include the fact that eighty percent of his code is not in frameworks, that the Zend Framework is the more flexible of the group and that the right tools, methods and language structure is the real key to making for successful software development.

Every so often I try to use PDO under PHP5, and every time I run in to basic functionality problems with no ability to find out what's going on under the hood.

He includes a few comments supporting his statement including an issue where a prepare() call didn't work, his frustration with not being able to see what's "under the hood" and the lack of documentation to help with these sorts of issues.

With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.

He points out that PHP, in essence, is a CGI-style execution and, in being so, makes it more flexible. Both sides, web and command line, can work with the language equally well. He also mentions the developer/administrator split he sees in PHP's structure and how the language facilitates it.

Historically, PHP has been developed following the scratch-an-itch method [...]. This development process makes for some haphazard functionality, and has, in the past, been the source of many annoyances that need to be handled with extreme care.

He does mention some of the good things that have come out of this process like OOP in PHP4, SimpleXML functionality and type hinting but warns that if things swing too much the other way (planning out everything, only adding things by committee) that PHP might swerve towards a dangerous precedent - the Java community's mentality.

The problem isn't that namespaces are bad, it's that these arcane structures seem to have so little impact on development in PHP today for many many people. Does that mean it's unimportant?

He talks about the real value of namespaces, a comparison to type hinting's inclusion, the current amount of (needless?) traffic on the php.internals list and his opinions on why namespaces are valid.

• A post on the Stubbes blog by Frank Kleine and his discoveries of how the "use" keyword needs to be used in your applications
• A follow-up post from Frank as well correcting some of the problems in his first examples
• Some opinions from Richard Heyes on how useful they seem to him
• Brian Moon's comments on the level of traffic that the namespace discussion has been getting on the php.internals mailing list.

Right now there's so many ideas flying around about what namespaces should be and how they should be implemented that it'll be interesting to see which ideas finally come out on top.

Without having done actual research, and depending on my personal experience alone, I would assert that in PHP userland there are maybe 20 or more general-purpose CMSes, 50 or more public frameworks, easily 100 or more templating libraries and only 5 unit-test systems.

His point is that there seems to be a glut of other application types - the CMSes, frameworks, etc - and not enough unit testing apps to spread around. He also comments of how this can affect the spread of unit testing in the PHP community.

Be sure to check out the long list of comments on the post with other opinions including one that's repeated - "unit testing is low level while those other things mentioned (CMSes, frameworks, etc) are high level). you can't really compare them."