The Sound of Symfony podcast, hosted by Magnus Nordlander and Tobias Nyholm, has posted their latest episode - Episode #16: Building a better bundle.

In this episode we discuss what makes a good Symfony bundle, and how you as a bundle author can build a better bundle.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their feed to get the latest on new shows as they're released. You can also view the archives from the main page of the site.

Davey Shafik has continued his series of posts with advice about growing a community around your product/open source libraries. In his first post he talked more about how to engage the community. In this latest post he talks about the role of "evangelists" in community relations (and why he dislikes the term).

The role of the Community Builder is to sell you on the idea of the company and the product. Not necessarily to sell you the product. Often times what we’re selling are not bought without some decision making process behind them, so a sale is not going to happen then and there anyway. Provide the education, and build the trust, and the sale will happen.

Davey then talks about why he hates the term "evangelist" and how it seems to relate more to "fanatic" than "advocate". He then gets into what he sees as the role of an advocate, including the role honesty plays and selling the customer on the right product. He then turns it around and talks about the other side of the role - advocating for the customer back to the rest of the company. Finally, he talks about two other kinds of advocacy that should also be included in the role: advocating for the community/their input and for yourself (finding a product you can be passionate about selling).

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Taylor Ren has started up a new series about building web applications with the Symfony 2 framework. In this first post he looks at one of the initial steps - bootstrapping (setting up) the framework and application.

In this series, I will capture a few key steps and some advanced techniques (image manipulation, pagination, dynamic contents, NativeQuery, etc) to help anyone who is considering using Symfony (note, to avoid future confusion, Symfony here refers to the Symfony 2, not the obsolete Symfony 1) as their PHP framework to develop a website.

This first part helps you get everything all set up - the latest version of the framework, Composer and checking for the default page to make sure everything's configured correctly. From there he starts to get into the "guts" of the application, introducing the MVC elements (entities), routing concepts and database configuration/integration.

Matthew Weier O'Phinnney has a new post to his blog filling in some additional details behind a series he's been doing on modules in the Zend Framework v2 releases. In this new post he answers the question "why modules?"

I've blogged about getting started with ZF2 modules, as well as about ZF2 modules you can already use. But after fielding some questions recently, I realized I should talk about why modules are important for the ZF2 ecosystem.

He covers some of the history of the idea, starting with the MVC rework/refactor of the framework and the desire from several people to have self-contained components that could be native to a ZF app. ZFv1 made it work (kinda) with Zend_Application, but it was difficult so solving this became a main focus of ZFv2. He illustrates with a "building block" metaphor based on his current blog site (currently being refactored too).

This kind of building-block development makes your job easier as a developer - and allows you to focus on the bits and pieces that make your site unique. As such, I truly feel that modules are the most important new feature of ZF2.

In a response to this post that introduced some basic security methods for your applications, Anthony Ferrara has posted some corrections and updates to the suggested methods, even pointing out where some of them are completely wrong.

Today an article popped into my feed reader that raise my eyebrows. The article's title is "Building Secured Web Applications Using PHP - The Basics". The summary of the item looked interesting, so I decided to open it up...What I found blew me away. It was filled with loads of bad information including some down-right wrong suggestions. Let me go through point by point and shed some light on the subject...

His response goes back through the original article by section header and explains either why the advice was bad and/or the more correct way to do things.

Security is not something you can learn in a page. It's not something that you can learn in a single book. It takes a lot of time and effort. It should not be trivialized into a simple "Do this and you'll be secure" style post. It sends the wrong message...

Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:

• Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks.
• Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page.
• Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.

Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.

Stefan Mischook has release three new parts of his "Building Objects in PHP" video series:

• Part 1 - This is a hands-on video where I hope the viewer will actually write code along with me. I want to stress that this video (like everything else on this site,) targets beginners .. not old PHP hacks.
• Part 2 - In this video, we actually use the object we created in Part 1, in our PHP page.
• Part 3 - In this video, I clarify a point I was trying to make in part 2. In a nutshell, I talk about why it makes sense to keep any page rendering code (HTML and CSS) out of your business logic classes.

Lots of other videos (on different topics too) are also posted on Stefan's website.

WebReference.com has posted part three of their "Building Blocks" series - a look at data types, literals, variables, and constants.

In part three, they focus more on the last type of "block" in their list - the constant:

Some real-world constants, such as pi, the speed of light, the number of inches in a foot, and the value of midnight, are values that don't change. PHP not only provides its own predefined constants but lets you create your own. Using constants makes it easy to write and maintain your programs.

There's talk of the define() and constant() functions and a mention of some of the predefined and "magic constants" as well.

WebReference.com has posted part three of their "Building Blocks" series - a look at data types, literals, variables, and constants.

In part three, they focus more on the last type of "block" in their list - the constant:

Some real-world constants, such as pi, the speed of light, the number of inches in a foot, and the value of midnight, are values that don't change. PHP not only provides its own predefined constants but lets you create your own. Using constants makes it easy to write and maintain your programs.

There's talk of the define() and constant() functions and a mention of some of the predefined and "magic constants" as well.

WebReference.com has posted part two in a series looking at the "building blocks" that make up PHP and its use. This time, it's a look at the containers for your data - the data types, literals, variables, and constants.

They go through each, explaining what they are, how they're used and when you'd want to use them in your code. They explain the data types and how those fit with each "container" and some basic things like valid names and how to assign things correctly.

They even get get into working with variables from GET and POST requests as well as working with the scope of variables and getting the metadata about them (is it an integer? is it empty?)