On NetTuts.com they're posted a new tutorial about using the Stripe service to accept credit cards on your site. Thanks to some handy libraries they provide, integration is a relatively simple process.

Until recently, accepting credit cards on a website was expensive and complicated. But that was before Stripe: a radically different and insanely awesome credit card processing company. Today, I'll show you how to start accepting cards in 30 minutes or less - without spending a dime.

They step you through the whole process you'll need to get the full flow set up:

• Install an SSL Certificate (on your server)
• Create an Account
• Create Your Payment Form
• Collect The Form Values
• Request a Token
• Create a Server-Side Script

Screenshots of the Stripe interface, HTML, Javascript and PHP code are all included - everything you need to make the simple card handling work. One of the keys to how Stripe deals with credit cards is that you provide it the card info, it gives you a token. Your app uses this to work with the card instead of storing the card information in your database (also making it more secure).

Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today asking "Why PHP?" - not so much a "why you should chose PHP for your development", more of a why PHP is the way it is.

Today on twitter there was a conversation going on about the responsiveness of the core PHP developers to PHP users. [...] This post isn't necessarily to correct perceived errors, to stand behind correct statements, or to state what I believe the problem is. Rather, it is to add something to the conversation that I don't think I've seen much of. The Twitter conversation was, for me, more of a contemplation kickoff and so the purpose of this post is to propose some thoughts for consideration. I don't have sufficient karma to propose changes directly, but I have bet my career on PHP and I want to see it beat the crap out of every language out there.

He points out that most of the opinions out there seem to be of the "what" PHP is rather than the "why" PHP is. He notes that the discussions about the core development (and developers) that's been happening recently is more of a symptom of a larger problem - an unclear definition as to what PHP is and what problem it's there to solve.

New from NETTUTS.com today there's a new article listing out some of the tools of the trade, the frameworks that web development professionals use (and not just with PHP).

New web development frameworks, promising rapid development and easy deployment, are sprouting out at a more rapid pace than you can keep up. In the last article, we looked at the various factors you'd have to consider when deciding on a framework. Today, we are going to look at the various frameworks available for each facet of web development.

PHP tools that made the list include CakePHP, the Zend Framework, Kohana and Symfony. Frameworks from some of the other languages include ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Blueprint.

Kamran Usman has posted some of his opinions about Zend - more specifically how he thinks they're headed in the wrong direction, moving away from the spirit of the PHP language.

Zend, the so called PHP Company is heading towards an unfriendly, commercial direction which I don't like. I mean, PHP was supposed to be an open source project, I see more focus from Zend on marketing and selling their commercial development tools, certifications and training kits, and less towards creating a free ecosystem that helps in making PHP a more accessible platform for everyone.

As a specific example, me mentions the recent Zend Server release and how they even contradict themselves in their own documentation. He mentions Zend Studio (Eclipse and bloated) and the Zend Framework (sloppy docs and slow) as further examples of things that Zend has either messed up or has not spent enough time on to make a quality product.

Chris Hartjes has blogged about the new CakePHP release that's on the horizon - version 1.2:

I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.

Greg Beaver has announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.