In this new post from Freek Lijten he looks at a set of git commit hooks written in PHP for making things happen before, during and post commit.

Git hooks are usually found inside the .git/hooks folder of your git repository. Git tends to provide sample hook files there which are postfixed with a .sample extension. These examples are written as shell scripts. Take a look at them if you want, but today we're talking PHP!

He briefly touches on the types of hooks you can set up and includes two example scripts showing a pre-commit lint test for the changed files and a check during the commit on the message given for a certain standard (in their case, it must start with a three letter code).

Christian Weiske has a problem he hopes you can help with - he's trying to get the PHP_Codesniffer tool integrated into his git workflow (well, the workflow of his team) as an automatic process that runs on commit. Unfortunately he's having some issues.

At work, we used a SVN server and enforced our project coding standard with a pre-commit hook on the server that ran PHP_CodeSniffer. Whenever a developer tried to commit some code that does not match the standard, he got it rejected. [...] The only way to enforce the standard is a pre-receive hook on our central Git repository server that all devs push to. Just installing the SVN hook on it isn't the solution, though.

Because of how git handles commits (possibly multiple in one push) the usual methods won't work. Other tricky things like file renaming and allowing for legacy code check-ins are also needed. He's posted the question on StackOverflow too, but no one's come up with a good answer yet (at the time of this post).

Johannes Schluter has a new post to his blog today about a recent addition to the latest trunk branch for PHP - a more interactive shell that will be installed right along with the language.

A few years ago I used another blog to write about "More PHP power on the command line" almost 5 years later the PHP interactive shell got a major update which went in PHP's trunk.

You can check out the commit message for more details on this new addition including paging ability and the ability to run PHP directly in the shell.

On the Blue Parabola blog Keith Casey asks the question "how do you measure an individual's contribution?"

In the past few weeks, I've been working fast and furious at getting web2project to our v1.0 milestone. As part of that effort, I track open issues, problematic modules, community feedback via the forums, death threats via all methods, and other related aspects.

He suggests a few different ideas for measuring how much a user has contributed: lines of code, commit count, issues they've reported, number of issues closed or community involvement. Of course, none of these can truly measure how much an individual has participated in a project, especially since it could be a mix of several of them combined into a whole as the "involvement persona" of any given person.

On the SaniSoft blog Tarique Sani has posted about (and made available for download) some code sniffs for the CakePHP framework. Some problems arose with some of the naming that the framework uses, but with some "tinkering around"...

[It became] apparent that I had to have my own set of Cake sniffs to manage this but a separate standard just for this seemed an over kill and the simplicity of code made it kind of fun to add more standards which I liked but were in different set of sniffs.

You can grab the whole list of sniffs from their downloads. They implemented them as a pre-commit hook on their SVN server even so that developers could not violate the coding standards when they submit their code.

The mentor list for this year's TestFest 2008 has been started (as mentioned by Ligaya Turmelle on her blog). The list so far includes people from the community like:

• Elizabeth Smith (near Chicago)
• Pierre Joye (Munich)
• Sebastian Bergmann (Cologne)
• David Coallier (Ireland & various others)

Local organizers are still being assigned. Those considered must already committers at PHP.net and will be available to answer questions for their given areas. Ultimately, they will do the final commits of the resulting tests.

Resulting from a conversation among developers at this year's PHP Quebec 2008 conference, a new event has been created to help test PHP against as many different configurations as it can be - TestFest.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event local UG are invited to join the TestFest. All it takes is a local organizer to spear head the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

The even will be announced sometime in March and its hope is to get as many people in the community involved to improve the language. There'll also be a raffle to give away 10 of the stuffed elePHPants as well as, for the ones who are "test worthy" and seem able to write up good tests on their own - commit CVS access to php.net as well as an official php.net account.

For more details on the event, check out this page on the (new) PHP.net wiki.

Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.

Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.

He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.

In his opinion:

No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.

Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.

The Internet Super Hero blog has two happy announcements posted today - the new mysqlnd driver has officially been committed to the branch for the next major PHP release - PHP 5.3 and their renewed support for PDO.

First, we are proud to announce that one year after the announcement to develop a new MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd), the new driver has been committed into the 5.3 branch of the PHP project.

The second news is that we will strengthen our commitment into PHP by improving our support for PHP Data Objects (PDO). We will work on a PDO/mysqlnd driver, both for PHP 5.3 and PHP 6.0. Development starts in these days and will include QA, testing and documentation as we go forward.

For those not familiar with the driver, they also have a brief overview of what it is and what it does differently than the normal MySQL driver as well as a look at which driver they consider the best for which PHP version.

David Coallier has some happy news for PHP developers all over - namespaces have officially been committed to to HEAD branch:

This means that the next PHP version (5.3) will have namespaces. The patch by Greg Beaver to allow multiple namespaces has not been applied yet but I sure do expect it to be applied to 5_3 and HEAD soon.

More technical details can be found via the patch details and some basic articles on how to use them in your code.