If you've been around the PHP community (or language) for any amount of time, you've noticed that the mascot for the language is an elephant. Back in the mid-2000s this mascot made a move into the real world and the first blue elePHPants were released as plush toys. Since then several different groups and companies have produced their own versions with their own colors and logos. There's several of them out there and the Field Guide to ElePHPants site lists them all.

The PHP elephpant, Elephpas hypertextus, was first sketched by Vincent Pontier in 1998. For ten years it was only seen in drawings. The plush elephpant was first sighted in 2007. Since that time a large number of variations have been observed in the wild.

The site covers fun facts about their overall appearance, identification of the generations, their "natural habitat" and how they're distributed. They then list each of the elePHPants including pictures, talking about the origins of each and several that are "coming soon" from other groups/conferences. Some of the elePHPants are more rare than others (like the Gold of which only one was produced) but more and more are coming on the scene all the time, usually as a part of Kickstarter campaigns.

Zend has posted a new press release about their acquisition by Rogue Wave Software, a company specializing in tools and services "making it easy to write, test, and run complex code."

Rogue Wave Software announced today that it has acquired Zend Technologies, the leader in end-to-end PHP web and mobile application development and deployment solutions. With 50 percent of the web workload running on PHP, including Magento, Drupal, and WordPress, Zend products drive PHP in the enterprise, from code creation through production deployment.

[...] “Today’s announcement expands Rogue Wave into PHP web and mobile application development, underscoring our goal to make developers heroes by accelerating their ability to create great code,” said Brian Pierce, CEO of Rogue Wave.

It's something that's definitely taken the PHP community by surprise and left many wondering what the future of the language my hold with Zend having been such a critical part of the engine that parses and executes the PHP code we write every day. Chris Tankersly has already shared some of his thoughts on the matter and why, as he puts it, this "doesn't matter" to PHP and it's community as much as some are thinking.

In his latest post Coen Jacons suggests that updating PHP is everyone's responsibility - that keeping the PHP installation on your systems up to date is important for everyone, not just the system administrators.

The number one remark I heard when I launched WPupdatePHP, is that users shouldn’t be bothered with this. In an ideal world, this is true, but in reality this isn’t going to stand for long. [...] I know the WordPress core team is working really hard to get webhosting companies to update their PHP versions and I agree up to a certain level that this is the best way. It’s not the only way though. [...] This will help lower the percentage of PHP 5.2 and 5.3 users out there. There still will be people on older PHP versions who are caught out and without them knowing what is going on, nothing will change for them.

He talks about the efforts the WordPress core team is doing to try to convince hosting providers to update, but points out that while WordPress aims to run on those old versions, staying on them is a mistake. He also mentions that an effort like this is a constant thing, always changing as the PHP versions released change. He ends the post with a "call to arms" for users out there, encouraging them to get talking to their hosting provider and get those PHP versions updated.

Don’t understand me wrong, I like what WordPress is doing to get these requirements bumped, but I think it’s not enough. I disagree on the fact that users shouldn’t be involved in this. It’s easy enough for users to request their hosting platform to be upgraded. If their request isn’t heard, they should find a better webhosting company. [...] It’s been long enough, I choose to act now.

In his latest post Adam Culp talks about an interesting (and slightly disturbing) trend he's seeing in the technology and developer community in his area: developers are leaving/being picked up faster than they're being replaced.

Over the past couple years I’ve noticed a rise of good companies no longer outsource offshore to save money, instead they outsource because they can’t find developers here. [...] I’m sad to see the dwindling number of developers available to fill a growing number of jobs in South Florida. [...] Couple this with most companies and recruiters simply drain the pool without giving back, and governments sinking more and more of our hard earned taxes into already flooded non-tech related fields. The end result is higher unemployment, folks with a degree who can’t find work, and the vicious cycle continues on and on.

As the demand grows for more talented technical people, this gap is only going to widen. New developers aren't coming in fast enough (or learning fast enough) to fill the holes. He talks specifically about what he's seeing there in Florida, but it's a story that's happening in many places around the country...and some places around the world. Developers get "snatched up" by companies and they're no longer allowed or have the time to contribute back and teach the newer developers. He links to an article that discusses the same topic and comes to many of the same conclusions.

On the QaFoo blog there's a recent post interviewing Johann Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower, about current PHP testing practices and how to find that "sweet spot" that works for your development.

Talking to interesting people spawns ideas and spreads insight knowledge. Therefore, I talked to Johann Peter Hartmann about testing culture and how PHP projects should approach testing in 2013.

They talk about things like:

• The move from "spaghetti code" to "quality code"
• A discussion of the current tools
• Defining a unit testing strategy
• Test Driven Development

They also talk some about the training that the QaFoo folks provided to help them (Mayflower) work all of this out for their organization.

Hasin Haydertalks about "getting comfy with PHPStorm" a relatively recent addition to the IDE ranks for PHP.

I am a big time fan of Netbeans and I left it a few days after it’s release of 6.7. It was so good, heavenly, yummy but I had to leave this old pal because of it’s extreme hunger to the available resources. [...] I left Netbeans and started using PhpStorm. I have a company license and I am glad that I made this move. I am not going to preach PhpStorm in rest of this article, but what I will do is sharing my experience with PhpStorm.

He goes through a list of his favorite things about the IDE - its speed it operates at overall, great Javascript/HTML intellisense, version control integration, less resource intensive and that it costs less overall (and comes from a "developer friendly" company).

If you're interested in trying out PHPStorm for yourself, you can find a demo at http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm.