On the Toptal PHP blog they've posted what they call the "vital guide" to PHP interviewing, a set of questions (and answers) that you could potentially ask a candidate you're looking to interview for that open PHP role in your organization. Obviously, since interviewing is all relative to the organization, this guide is just that - a series of example questions you could ask to determine overall competency.

Ubiquitous…that is definitely one word you could use to describe PHP in relation to the web. It really is everywhere. [...] But therein lies much of the challenge of finding highly-skilled PHP developers. PHP’s relatively low barrier-to-entry and 20 year history means that PHP developers have become practically as ubiquitous as the technology itself. Yet while many can legitimately claim to “know” PHP, those who are true experts in the language are capable of producing software that is much more scalable, functional, robust, and maintainable.

[...] Toward that goal, this guide offers a sampling of effective questions to help evaluate the breadth and depth of a candidate’s mastery of PHP.

There's quite a few questions in their guide, touching on a wide range of PHP-related topics both more intermediate and advanced. This includes questions like:

• "Explain the use and purpose of the global keyword in PHP. Provide an example of a case where its use would be appropriate, as well as one where it would not be."
• "Describe namespacing in PHP and why it is useful."
• "Describe the relationship between php://input and $_POST. How would you access the php://input stream?"
• "Explain the purpose and usage of the __get, __set, __isset, __unset, __call, and __callStatic “magic” methods. When, how, and why (and perhaps why not) should each be used?"
• "Describe one or more Standard PHP Library (SPL) data structures. Give usage examples."
• "How does PHP build an array internally?

Each question includes a correct answer (or guidelines to verifying their answer in some of the more open ended questions) so you can ensure the interviewee is competent in the language and its use. Keep in mind, however, that this should not be considered required knowledge for a developer - that's up to what the organization needs and what level they're trying to fill.

SitePoint had another "Talk with the Experts" session with two of their own developers, Jude Aakjaer and Michael Sauter. They've posted the full transcript of the session to their PHP blog today. It was a Q&A session between them and the attendees.

Topics discussed included:

• What beginners should know about PHP
• Most used frameworks
• Using WordPress
• Tools/IDEs the two developers like
• Packagist/Composer
• Using 3rd party libraries
• Naming conventions and namespacing

You can read the full discussion here.

If you're looking to test out your application security knowledge, you might want to give Timo's Web Application Security Quiz a try:

Web Application Security Quiz tests your knowledge on the common security principles and quirks related to web application development. There are 15 questions. A correct answer adds one point. An incorrect answer subtracts one point. If you don't know the right answer, you can skip the question (no points are added or subtracted).

It's a pretty good overview of some of the concepts you'd find in most application security policies and includes the answers if you're interested in some of the reasoning behind them.

In response to some questions he got from a student, Evan Coury has shared the answers to his questions about software development and engineering:

I found his questions to be well-posed and thoughtful, so I figured I’d post my responses as a blog post. I’ll be sending this post to Jordan, so if anyone has additional comments or advice for the kid, please feel free to leave some wisdom in the comments!

Some of the questions include:

• Describe the duties and responsibilities of someone working in software engineering.
• Do you have assignments that seem to drag on forever, or are they usually pretty quick?
• Are there any specific tools or equipment required for your job?
• What are the advantages/disadvantages?
• So do most people work for themselves, private industry, or the government?

You can read Evan's answers to these and more in the full post.

On Developer Drive today they've posted the most recent article in a tutorial series showing you how to create a user survey that stores the results to a database table. In this latest tutorial, they show how to hook the current code into a MySQL backend.

In the first two parts of this series, we created the data layer that will hold the polling data and established methods for setting the variable values and reading from the database tables. In this part, we will build the methods that will write new polls and answers to the tables.

They include the code for an "addPoll" method that inserts the questions and answers for the polls. Their "editPoll" method updates the poll questions/answers and the "addVote" method does exactly like it sounds - adding a vote to one of the poll options. Also included are "deletePoll", "activatePoll" and "deactivatePoll".

Mirroring the move they made previously to move the Yahoo! Bookmarks service over to Symfony, the company has updating their Yahoo! Answers service to be the same. According to the symfony blog today:

Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

The post shares some of the thoughts behind the move including their philosophy, the design of the project and a link to a presentation given on the update.

For those looking at taking the Zend PHP Certification but aren't quite sure what will be on the test, Zend has a sample test you can take to get a glimpse into it. David Coallier has taken it one step further and has posted the answers to the exam on his blog.

Are you someone preparing for the Zend PHP5 Certification ? Have you tried the online self test ? Well here I am giving up the answers so you can help and correct yourself if you didn't get 100% (8/8)

He also recommends taking the test if you'd like to give your career that little extra boost. It helps separate you from the pack and give you something real to show you know a little something about the language.

For those looking at taking the Zend PHP Certification but aren't quite sure what will be on the test, Zend has a sample test you can take to get a glimpse into it. David Coallier has taken it one step further and has posted the answers to the exam on his blog.

Are you someone preparing for the Zend PHP5 Certification ? Have you tried the online self test ? Well here I am giving up the answers so you can help and correct yourself if you didn't get 100% (8/8)

He also recommends taking the test if you'd like to give your career that little extra boost. It helps separate you from the pack and give you something real to show you know a little something about the language.

For anyone that attended his talk at the International PHP Conference and were wondering what the answers to his quiz were, wonder no more. Christopher Kunz has posted the answers in his latest blog entry.

If you need a little explanation on the PHP Security Quiz by Mayflower, just read the extended entry. Just as a quick hint for the answers, I decided to blog about which answer is right - and why.

There's only four questions to the quiz, but it's good that he explains each. Some of them, especially dealing with regular expressions and Javascript attacks need a bit of explanation.

For those that couldn't make it out to the conference, here's the questions that match up with those answers.

For anyone that attended his talk at the International PHP Conference and were wondering what the answers to his quiz were, wonder no more. Christopher Kunz has posted the answers in his latest blog entry.

If you need a little explanation on the PHP Security Quiz by Mayflower, just read the extended entry. Just as a quick hint for the answers, I decided to blog about which answer is right - and why.

There's only four questions to the quiz, but it's good that he explains each. Some of them, especially dealing with regular expressions and Javascript attacks need a bit of explanation.

For those that couldn't make it out to the conference, here's the questions that match up with those answers.