This is a follow-up on the article Dries Buytaert wrote in 2007 PHP is dead... long live PHP!. In the article he shared same concern that Nick Lewis for the slow adoption rate of PHP 5, less than 20% at that time. And he encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5. [...] Well, PHP 5 adoption rate is 96.9%, and PHP 4 is quite dead. Mission accomplished. Let's have a look to the overall PHP health.

He shares data from a few sources about the popularity and adoption of PHP in applications/sites all across the web. Sources include Netcraft survey results, W3Tech usage summaries and Stack Overflow tagging matches (complete with graphs of each set of data).

At work, we used a SVN server and enforced our project coding standard with a pre-commit hook on the server that ran PHP_CodeSniffer. Whenever a developer tried to commit some code that does not match the standard, he got it rejected. [...] The only way to enforce the standard is a pre-receive hook on our central Git repository server that all devs push to. Just installing the SVN hook on it isn't the solution, though.

Because of how git handles commits (possibly multiple in one push) the usual methods won't work. Other tricky things like file renaming and allowing for legacy code check-ins are also needed. He's posted the question on StackOverflow too, but no one's come up with a good answer yet (at the time of this post).

The thing to remember about questions, answers and comments, though, is that they don't exist in a vacuum. They're created by users, and it's the users that make the site tick. That's why the Stack Exchange API includes a large number of methods designed to let developers access user profiles and timelines, and unearth the relationships between users and their posts. This article will focus primarily on this dimension of the Stack Exchange API, illustrating how to search for users, obtain user profiles and timelines, and retrieve information on a user's questions, answers, comments, badges and tags.

You'll need to get the StackPHP PEAR package to follow along with the code examples (it does some of the hard work for you). He shows how to:

• Grab a list of users ordered by reputation
• Search for usernames matching a string
• Get badge information (in general and for a user)
• Finding a user's activity timeline

Near the end he also includes an example of using the Zend_Paginator component of the Zend Framework to filter down the results to a more manageable size.