Joe Ferguson has a new post to his site sharing a bit about how he uses Homestead (the Laravel project's virtual machine offering) in his every day development.

I feel like I’ve been talking about homestead a lot lately. I feel like Vagrant is such an important part of a developer’s workflow. If you are still using MAMP, WAMP, or installing Virtual Machines manually you are wasting so much of your own time (and your clients money) by not using prebuilt development environments. [...] I prefer to have my open source projects contain a Vagrant environment so that any potential contributor can easily clone my repository and run “vagrant up”. [...] The recent changes to Homestead have brought the option to use Homestead exactly as I do, without having to use my own packages or copy and paste files.

He walks you through the simple process of getting a project set up with this Homestead-per-project configuration:

• Starting a new Project
• Adding Homestead as a dependency
• Make the Homestead configuration for this project

Now when a "vagrant up" is run from the project, Vagrant understands to create a Homestead virtual machine instance, import the base box and configure it to be a locally hosted web server for your application. He also includes instructions for using it with non-Laravel applications and how to share the environment.

Noupe.com has posted their list of the top twenty useful components and tutorials that could be useful for PHP developers in their day to day work. The list includes:

• PHP components: Autosuggest
• Sanitize and Validate Data with PHP Filters
• Building Your First Simple CMS
• How to Make a Password Strength Meter Like Google
• How to Validate Forms in both sides using PHP and jQuery
• Smart Image Resizer

When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of javascript you can produce some pretty cool results. [... This list is] the best 20 FREE PHP Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure. Give them a try.

Cal Evans has pointed out just some of the recent tutorials and articles that have popped up about the Zend Framework in a recent Zend Developer Zone post:

If you are working with Zend Framework, there's no need to struggle with any concept, chances are good that there is help on-line you can tap. Here are two resources that have recently come on-line. I'm sure there are more.

There's two in his list this time - a look at what's new in version 1.5 of the framework and the PHP Everyday site providing fresh PHP-related content each day.