The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today with what it calls the eight must- have PHP QA tools to ensure the overall quality of your codebase. These tools cover everything from unit testing out to ensuring code standards are met.

The [QA Tools] site is a simple list of interesting tools that can help you properly test your application, while also analyzing it and producing interesting data for you to look at. This post will be little more than a re-iteration of some of those tools with added information, use cases and advice about them – however, we’re open to expanding this list with other QA tools you throw our way that get plenty of votes in the comments below or seem interesting and/or useful enough.

Their list of eight covers a wide range of QA needs:

• PHPUnit
• Behat
• vfsStream
• PHPLOC
• PHP Mess Detector
• PHP CodeSniffer
• Dead Code Detector
• Copy Paste Detector

For each there's a brief description and some of the commands you'll need to get it installed. Configuring them for your environment is a bit out of the scope of the article, though, so you'll have to pick that up on your own.

Matt Curry has a new post to his blog listing a few ways that you can help get the most out of your CakePHP application's performance.

It's a not so well kept secret that CakePHP is slow. What isn't well know is that this is done by design. I could get in a lot of trouble by revealing this, but I'm willing to take that risk. [...] Every time you use one of the tips in this article it's one less gold chain on the neck of a Cake developer.

Here's his list of eight tips:

• Set Debug to 0
• Cache your slow queries/web service requests/whatever
• View Caching
• HTML Caching
• APC (or some other opcode cache)
• Persistent Models
• Store The Persistent Cache in APC
• Speed Up Reverse Routing

Some of the tips are CakePHP specific, but several of them (the caching) can be useful no matter what sort of application you're using - framework or not.