[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.

The Google Data API support comes with a few gotchas. Its documentation show a clear preference for using GET instead of POST, though the Google OAuth server does appear to natively support POST requests for everything with the exception that it has a small bug which interprets an empty POST request body as a sort of phantom empty parameter.

He notes that the library he's been working on (and submitted to both the Zend Framework and PEAR) it up to the 0.0.3 release including functionality marked as beta for the Consumer portion.

It was a shame really as it was a really exciting project with Microsoft leading the way in the area. It's been only recently that Google and Yahoo have caught up and released their own APIs for accessing their users data. [...] With the possibility of actually using the code myself creeping up on the horizon I decided to put the time in to write wrappers for PHP. It can be broken down into two components.

These two components are the delegated authentication, used to get permission from the user to grab the data, and the actual interface to the Windows Live Contacts data. Both packages have been submitted to PEAR.

Statistics and reports analyze the change over time of any kind of phenomena. [...] For the software industry, statistics and reports provide both an ongoing challenge and an ongoing market. At present, programming languages such as PHP and Java come with built-in packages for developing applications around statistical problems.

They use two PEAR packages for the statistics - Text_Statistics and XML_Statistics to pull in different kinds of data and extract results from it. The next step is to make a meaningful report out of these numbers - that's where PHPReports comes in. It's a simple tool that makes simple reports for you that can then be styled with CSS however you'd like.

It's been a while since I did some active ZF/PEAR component development. It's been one of those 6 month periods where time to commit was a rarity for a few reasons. So now that I'm back on the road, where to?

He sets his sights on the Zend_Crypt component and details some of the encryption methods it contains - HMAC, the Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Protocol, a hashing wrapper and proposed support for a RSA public key cryptography. He mentions that a lot of this support is already in a beta package for PEAR.

My place as I consider it and as Greg mentioned on the mailing list yesterday is much more "ambassadorial" than "presidential" and being the PEAR ambassador around the world, I'll be glad to discuss, argue, improve the general idea of PEAR to anyone. I'll also be happy to discuss PEAR2 if anyone is interested but first and foremost I'll be happy to help our new PEAR Group (which I am pretty sure won't need help ) and the community.

You can find out more about the results of this year's elections on the PEAR election pages from pear.php.net.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PEAR package which detects potential coding problems and enforces your style guide. The default is the PEAR coding standard, but you can easily change that.

His method requires the creation of a custom "FooCodingStandard.php" (named whatever you'd like, of course) that contains a class/method defining the "sniffs" you'd like to use for your standard. Use "pfm" to make it into a package and install it to your system - you'll be all set.

OpenID, a free, open-source framework for "single sign-on" across different Web sites and applications. The even better news? There already exist a bunch of PHP widgets that allow developers to easily integrate OpenID into a PHP application, and this article is going to show you how to use them. So what are you waiting for? Flip the page, and let's get going!

For those not familiar with the authentication method, he defines OpenID and shows how it can help with the "too many passwords, too many accounts" problem many users face. He uses the PHP OpenID Library and the Authentication::OpenID_Consumer PEAR package (as well as several other PEAR packages to help with the connections and message formatting). He builds two simple forms to use the service - one to authenticate a user and another to create a new account.

As every year it is the time of the election for the PEAR Group and PEAR President for the year 2008 and 2009. If you haven't casted your vote just yet, NOW is the perfect time to do it so go to the election page and place your vote.

You can find out more about the elections from the page for the Presidental election and for the Group elections. You must be a PEAR developer in order to vote.

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.