Lukas Smith has written up the FAQ for the emPHPower movement and has posted about them on his blog:

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The FAQ includes answers to lots of questions including:

• How to I get involved?
• What is the target audience?
• Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?
• What is the purpose of the membership fees?
• Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?
• Who decides on what emPHPower does?

Kore Nordmann has published a new FAQ on some common questions he gets about character sets and content encoding.

After lots of questions recently on IRC about charsets and encodings, I decided to write up a FAQ about this. The FAQ can now be found in the article section of my website.

Questions answered include "What is the difference between unicode and UTF-8/UTF-16/...?" and "What does "multibyte charset/encoding" mean?" as well as topics like transliteration and character set support in PHP.

The PHP 10.0 Blog has the quick and dirty version posted today of the full namespaces readme that's been posted about the upcoming namespace support in PHP.

We now have an implementation of namespaces in PHP 6 HEAD, so here's a short FAQ about how they work for those that are too laz^H^H^Hbusy to read the whole README.namespaces.

It's an FAQ sort of list (quick questions and answers) with eleven questions that give an overview of what will be supported. This includes why they've been implemented, what some of the syntax is and looks like and how they can be used in files.

Also note namespaces are still work in progress, so it may happen it would be changed a lot when it's released.

The PEAR Blog has posted a request for ideas to help work up a new developer FAQ they can hand out to potential PEAR developers as a "jumpstart" guide to working with the package repository.

New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.

They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.

Those interested in the PHP Throwdown will definitely want to check out this update on the competition from the Zend Developer Zone:

Things are really starting to heat up for the PHP Throwdown contest. A number of updates have been released. Let me give you a quick rundown of them.

The updates include the setup of a subversion repository (along with login credentials for the teams), a FAQ that's been set up to help with common questions, and the prize list that's been posted. Be sure to stick with the PHP Throwdown site for the latest information.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest reader poll for the week. The question they posed to visitors of their site asked about their favorite FAQ manager from those on the list:

• phpMyFAQ
• ODFaq
• Lethal Penguin's FAQMasterFlex
• All
• None

The result was a resounding 60% for the first on the list - phpMyFAQ. Next down in ranking was the "None" option, making phpMyFAQ the undisputed champ for FAQ management in PHP (well, at least for this poll).

Be sure to check out this week's poll that asks which of the four options is the most common perspective regarding objects in PHP.

The International PHP Magazine has wrapped up another pool this week - one that asked the question of what (of their choices) was the most common design pattern out there.

Choices for the poll were:

• Factory pattern
• Singleton pattern
• Observer Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Others

Top on the list was the Singleton pattern by a wide berth. Below it, coming in nearly twenty percent less was the Factory Pattern.

Be sure to check out and vote on this week's poll that asks, out of the given list of FAQ management applications, which does it the most effectively.

Steven Choy lists in this new blog posting some of the more popular PHP offerings for creating and managing FAQ systems.

The following are three PHP scripts for creating and maintaining web-based Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) systems. They are all free of charge and can use MySQL as database in the backend. I also try to google them to see if there are any example websites that make a good use of them.

The three he mentions are:

• phpMyFAQ
• ODFaq
• Lethal Penguin's FAQMasterFlex

He briefly describes each, noting a few of the sites that use each under them. He doesn't really recommend one over the other, however - again a "right tool for the right job" situation. Each has its own strengths that can play well with what your needs might be.

Joshua Eichorn talks in his latest blog post today about a specific question he's answered about his PEAR package, HTML_AJAX, over on it's wiki site. It was something he gets asked a lot, so he thought he'd post it here as well.

I answered an FAQ question tonight on the HTML_AJAX wiki, im posting the answer here as well since I know most people don't check the wiki for changes every day.

Outside of this answer I'd like to hear from what other libraries people would like too see integrated with HTML_AJAX and the reasons for this.

Question: Will HTML_AJAX integrate with other Javascript AJAX libraries such as scriptaculous? How would this integration look like?

He answers that there are no specific plans to work towards integration with those sorts fo libraries, mainly for dependency issues. He notes that merges like that should be taken care of at a "higher level" than his package would deal with anyway. There is the functionality, however, to load in external Javascript libraries (general).