In this edition I talked with [Stefan Priebsch @spriebsch] who is one of the Elite members of The PHP Consulting Company, thePHP.cc. He is regarded as a highly knowledgeable gentleman, has rewritten an array of books related to Software Development and software life cycles; in short Stefan is an acclaimed expert for PHP software development. One of his talks which I highly recommend is "Why MVC is not an application architecture". Fortunately it's a video, so you will be able to both see and hear Stefan talk about it.

They talk about Stefan's current involvement with the language and community as well as some of his own past. Topics include:

• How he sees the state of PHP now versus when he started with the language
• What kinds of tools he uses for his development and debugging
• What he likes and dislikes about the language
• Some of his good (and bad) moments in the community and at conferences

You can read the full interview here.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2010 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2010 in Santa Clara, CA and features Stefan Priebsch giving his talk: "Why MVC is not an Application Architecture"

You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 of the session to listen at your leisure. You can also see the slides over on slideshare.

The object-relational impedance mismatch makes persisting PHP objects in a relational database a daunting task. How about these new schemaless NoSQL databases? We will have a look at the problems involved with persisting PHP objects, and introduce design patterns that help solving these problems. Putting the patterns to good use, we will build a working PHP object persistence solution for MongoDB.

You can download the episode as an mp3 and follow along with the slides for a more complete picture.

The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and I write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book. [...] Our motivation to write this book is simple: there is no such book on the market and from our experience a book such as this is needed.

The book will be printed in both English and German and will be release in the later part of this year (2009).

In times of tight budgets, quality is a key success factor to reduce risks in IT projects. [...] We help businesses and enterprises to reduce IT costs in the long term with Open Source technologies and PHP in particular. We support our clients in improving their employee's qualification to overcome skills shortages.

You can get more information about the group (including conferences they'll be at and contact information) from their site - thePHP.cc.

Thanks to the hard work of Elizabeth, Marco, and all the others at php|architect, my new book, php|architect's Guide to PHP 5 Migration has been released.

The book aims to be the only one you'll need when it comes to guiding you and your applications from the PHP4 dark ages up to the world of PHP5. You can order your copy directly from php|architect - the Print/PDF combo for about $33 CAD and the PDF only for around $30 CAD.

Written by Stefan Priebsch, this is the only book you will need to help you through the rough spots when migrating your PHP apps from PHP4 to PHP5. Not only is this an extremely comprehensive and in-depth resource, it will show you virtually every pitfall you may encounter and will undoubtedly make your migration as smooth as possible.

The book covers things like the concepts surrounding migration, some strategies to follow and an outline of a recommended migration process (as well as some tools to help). You can find out more about this new book on its page on the php|architect website and order your own copy - $33 CAD for the print and PDF versions together and just $29 CAD for the PDF only.