Ralph Schindler, realizing that he's spent too many years in a NCH syndrome (Not Coded Here) environment has started up a series of posts working from the group up about best practices and good development ideas for turning out better applications.

Well, I've seen my share of PHP centric projects come and go. In addition to those projects, I've kept a watchful eye on projects in other communities such as the Ruby, Perl, Java and .NET communities. From them, we've borrowed concepts, ideas and tools to create better solutions for the PHP community. With that, I'll continue on with explaining several of the most common facets of any PHP project. If this seems basic at first, its actually laying the groundwork for a few more in-depth articles down the line.

In this first post of the series he looks at (and defines) environments, libraries and applications.