Travis Swicegood, a member of the Standards Group that has formed in the PHP community, has posted some of his own thoughts about the group and what kinds of goals he sees it having.

A few weeks ago at php|tek, I corralled developers from all of the major PHP frameworks into one of the conferences rooms. The idea was simple: in the PEAR Group we've been discussing our new PEAR2 Coding Standard and have come to some conclusions on how PHP 5.3 code should be handled moving forward. A standard is only a standard if people use it, though, and PEAR is not entirely representative of the community at large. That's where this group comes in.

He mentions resolving namespacing issues around naming structures, classes/interfaces/abstracts and for Exceptions. He also sums up his thoughts on the openness of the group well:

I'd love to see an officially sanctioned standard come out of our work. All of us are too busy, both with real jobs and our various projects, to fight the battles that come of trying to make this a completely open process where anyone with an email address can contribute. Sad as it may be, pear-dev has demonstrated that coding standards *must* go the way of sausages and laws lest they devolve into a constant "but I think is better, and this is why..." followed by pages of well meaning, but generally irrelevant content.