With more and more frameworks popping up every day in the PHP community, it's important to ask yourself one question - should I learn a framework? Ian Christian tries to answer that question in a recent post to his blog.

With other programming languages designed for the web, there's typically a framework that works hand in hand. [...] I imagine people will always write from the ground up with PHP, some people do it to learn, some I suspect think there's nothing out there that can do what they want, where as others perhaps do it just to prove themselves, or to gain fame. Good luck to them all, some of them are probably going to do a good job, but alas - I imagine most are wasting their time.

He breaks his opinions out into two sides of the argument - the business issues and the developer side, each with their own plusses and minuses. Overall, though, he definitely suggests learning some kind of framework, even if you don't end up working with it - it's just good experience.

Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

If you're in the area of The Netherlands and you're into PHP, consider yourself lucky - just look at all the events that Ivo Jansch mentions in one of his more recent blog entries:

PHP is still growing in The Netherlands (according to nexen.net, 46% of Dutch domains use PHP). A good indicator of PHP's growth is the number of conferences and other events that are organized this year. [...] This year alone, there are already 6 major (>50) events; 3 done, 3 to go.

Some of the events (like Dutch Joomla Days and the PHP Business Seminar) have already passed but there's still a chance to get in on a few others like Kings of Code and the Dutch PHP Conference.

Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has written up a summary of an event he recently attend and spoke at in the Netherlands - the PHP Business Seminar.

I've just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by IBuildings and Sogeti.

He talks about the conference, some of the presentations (a bit of which he caught, they were all in Dutch) and his experience presenting - twice, once with Red Bull and once without. If you want a bit more detail (and the slides from his talk) check out Cal's post on his personal blog too.

DynamicWebPages.de has pointed out a new offering for the German PHP community - Zend's ZendOne video channel provding information on Zend's products, PHP development, training information and business-related information.

While the focus in the Product channel is on the Zend Platform, the Development channel contains information (videos and/or announcements), so far, on the Zend Framework. On the Training channel, there's been a few sessions announced (including a presentation on SimpleXML) while the Business channel is still empty.

Be sure to check out their main events page for updates to each of the four categories. All sessions will be in German.

A new article over on Stefan Mischook's blog today talks about why PHP should be the language of choice as told from a business mindset.

I have written this article to speak to business owners and other non-nerd types. [...] I concentrate on the business arguments and only touch on the technological issues underlying them … when it makes sense to mention the nerd stuff.

He talks about answers to the "business questions" (like "Is the language reliable?"), about how PHP was made for the web not adapted to it and a quick story of his own to back up his points (started a project with Java and moved to PHP for thousands of dollars in savings).

Stuart Herbert looks today at some of the reasoning behind the push to move developers out to PHP5 - specifically that there's a lack of commercial-related discussion about what issues there might be.

What I'm not seeing are the commercial arguments to move to PHP 5 (/me points an accusing finger at the folks from Zend, with whom this discussion has been had before). Businesses will only make the move when there is something to gain from the effort, when the rewards of switching are more than the cost of doing nothing. So let's see if we can find some reasons to chivvy them along!

He breaks the rest of the post into sections:

• Why Move To PHP 5?
• What's The Cost Of Staying On PHP 4?
• What Are The Barriers To Moving To PHP 5?
• How Do I Cover My Costs Of Upgrading?
• What Are The Alternatives To PHP 5?
• Making The Move

David Mytton submitted some information in an email to us today pointing out a new UK-based website, WeLoveLocal.com, and a SOAP API that they offer:

welovelocal.com is essentially the Yellow Pages written by your friends. It provides a full directory of UK businesses (currently London only but launching across the UK shortly) and contextualises the reviews, and a network of friends around you.

The SOAP API allows you to query the sites data stores with different functions that let you get businesses by a search term, get their reviews and search the businesses based on a category and a search term. The reference page includes the input and output values of the API as well as some sample PHP code to show you how to make the request (using the SOAP functionality in PHP5).

The PAT group has released the latest version of their popular templating library - patTemplate 3.1.0 stable.

After two years of development we finally released patTemplate 3.1.0 as a stable version. The changes since the last beta release are minimal. You can read about all changes since the last stable release in the changelog. patTemplate can be downloaded from our PEAR channel server or easily installed via the PEAR installer.

The patTemplate system helps developers separate out the business logic from the layout and content of their site to make maintenance easier for both the designer and the developer.

According to this post on the php|architect website, Zend is going to start offering online seminars ("Webinars").

Webinar Wednesdays will be an ongoing series of webinars and demos focusing on various development, deployment and business related PHP topics. Webinars will include presentations, demos and Q&A. Expected topics include: Enterprise PHP, Java Integration, PHP Security and Training.

The webinars are free of charge and are open to any developer wishing to attend. Many more topics will come in the future, but for now, there are only three on the agenda:

• Business Critical Web Applications with PHP (May 9th)
• Enterprise Enable Your PHP Applications (May 9th)
• Caffinated PHP, Integrating PHP and Java (May 23rd)

All will be happening around the same time of day (8 to 9:30am Pacific) and you can enroll at any time - up to the time of the event, of course.