Martin Hujer has put together a new post to his site sharing some of the PhpStorm plugins he considers essential for Symfony development, making your life easier as you create applications with this popular framework.

I've been using PhpStorm for quite a while and I'm still surprised now and then when it suggests an auto-completion for something I thought that's not possible.

But there are still many things - usually framework- or library-specific - that PhpStorm cannot do on its own. But there are plugins that can step in place and do the magic for specific framework or library.

Several of the plugins are more for improving PHP development in general but others are more Symfony-specific:

• PHP Annotations
• PHP Toolbox
• Symfony Plugin
• PHPUnit Enhancement
• PHP composer.json support
• Php Inspections (EA Extended)
• Twig Support
• .env files support
• .ignore

Each item in the list comes with a brief introduction to the plugin, links to find out more information, and, in some cases, animations of it in use in the editor.

On the CodeWall.co.uk blog Dan Englishby has shared his list of what he considers the "must have" extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor for PHP developers to help make them more productive and make their jobs simpler.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it.

In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.

His list includes tools for a wide range of tooling and helpful functions including:

• PHP Intellisense
• DocBlocker
• PHP Getter & Setter
• Custom Snippet Pack
• PHP Files Extension

Each item in the list has a link to the extension in the VSCode marketplace and a brief description of what it can do.

On the Laravel Daily site they've posted an interview with Bobby Bouwmann, one of the most active (and awarded) members of the Laracasts website. Laracasts is an online learning site for instruction on the use of the Laravel framework and related technologies.

In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.

In the interview Bobby answers questions about:

• what drives him to participate in the forum
• what value he finds in Laracasts
• how he handles "developers" that don't bother looking for answers in documentation
• what he does when he sees the same question asked over and over

His final answer offers some advice to Jeffrey Way about the forum itself, making a suggestion of how to improve it by "keeping the forum clean".

<p. Brandon Savage has posted a list of blogs he suggests following for those interested in the PHP community including (disclaimer) PHPDeveloper.org itself.

A lot of people, especially when starting out in PHP, ask me “what blogs should I read?” There are a lot of great PHP blogs (you can see a nearly complete list of them at Planet PHP) but there are a few that I read on a regular basis and I feel are important.

His list includes PHP community members like Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Chris Hartjes, Anthony Ferrara and the PHPMaster.com site from SitePoint. Check out the full list for more great blogs.

In this new post Ralph Schindler takes a look at the Prototype design pattern and uses it to illustrate some best practices in using constructors in PHP.

If your knowledge of constructors ends with "the place where I put my object initialization code," read on. While this is mostly what a constructor is, the way a developer crafts their class constructor greatly impacts the initial API of a particular class/object; which ultimately affects usability and extensibility. After all, the constructor is the first impression a particular class can make.

He starts at ground level, reintroducing what a constructor is and what it should (and shouldn't) be used for. He talks about constructor overloading, constructor injection, dynamic class extension and using the Prototype pattern to create "an unlimited number of objects of a particular type, with dependencies in tact, each with slight variations." He gives an example with a "DbAdapter" class, showing dynamic class instantiation and how to, using the Prototype method, inject a DbAdapter object and have your class use that instead.

Kevin Schroeder has a suggestion for developers out there - you should hit F5 more often:

The best developers hit "Refresh"? No. Well, yes, but that's not what I was referring to. F5 is what you hit in Zend Studio/PDT to "Step Into" during a debug session. A LOT of developers just look at an API, or code completion, write to it, commit, deploy and they're done. I have found that the best developers not only build to the API, whatever it is, but also watch the API at work.

In his opinion, he's never met "the smartest PHP developer", someone who couldn't learn something from stepping through someone else's code. You don't even need to fully know what's going on to catch helpful bits of code or new ideas you may not have thought of along the way. He also suggests conferences (like ZendCon) are an excellent place to pick these same things up, just in person.

Having been asked what people can do to become better programmers, I would respond by saying that hitting F5 would be pretty high on my list.

On LearnComputer.com there's a new post with their top five choices of PHP books they see as good resources for any developer wanting to improve their grasp of the language.

Continuing with our best-five-book series, today we are introducing our pick of the top 5 PHP books. Obviously, PHP has been around much longer than our other review subjects such as Android or HTML5, and there is a greater general variety of books to choose from.

Their list of top five covers a pretty good range of skillsets, but leans more towards the introductory level:

• Professional PHP6 (and yes, they mention that the title is "blatant false advertising" since PHP6 is nowhere to be found)
• Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites
• PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy
• Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice To Professional
• Head First PHP & MySQL

Adminx Web has posted a list that, in their opinion, contains the fifteen frameworks that should be considered the "best ever" in PHP development. Some of them you might not have heard of, but give it a read and see if you agree.

Frameworks are the streamlined flow of PHP codes meshed up and baked for you to just use and implement. PHP frameworks are the result of codes written by many talented developers around the world. In other words, PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development (RAD), which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers. Today, in this article, we present before you 15 best PHP frameworks that are both light and easy to implement.

The frameworks mentioned cover more than just your typical MVC application environment. There's a few that touch on other technologies like REST, microframeworks and Ajax integration. Here's some of the list:

• Recess
• Akelos
• Tekuna
• Zend Framework
• CodeIgniter

Mike Bernat has come up with a list of (eight things) his best practices when it comes to PHP development:

I suggest a more retro-active approach [than trial and error]. Studying, surrounding, and forcing yourself to abide by best-practice coding standards will yield surprising results in your applications despite the fact that it may seem like more work than it's worth.

Topics included in his list are things like:

• Always develop with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT
• Portability, Portability, Portability!
• Don't over-think!
• Validate & Sanitize your Inputs!

Check out the rest of the post for more suggestions and explainations.

Roshan Bhattarai has set up an informal poll in an entry on his site asking visitors to rate what they think the "best" PHP framework is.

I've been asked a lot of times which is the best PHP framework. Well, it's a very difficult question to answer this question and there are some pros and corns in each framework. So, today I would to hear your views via poll.

Included in the list are CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter. Coming out with around forty-three percent of the votes, though, is the Zend Framework with CakePHP following with twenty-two percent.