Two new posts on the Symfony blog talk about improvements to the framework's plugin system (as found in recent releases).

A week after the release of the new plugin system, a lot of activity has taken place. More than 30 plugins were created, and 51 new releases were published on 27 different plugins. Based on the feedback I have received from the community, I have made some tweaks to the system.

These tweaks include a newly designed homepage, the inclusion of RSS feeds and a special URL to view the older wiki documentation for some plugins.

The second post describes more enhancements based on other feedback (on the previous post). Updates based on this information include an new "overview" field to describe the plugin, a download of the Markdown syntax to make the documentation conversion easier and a "stric mode" validation if you upload a PEAR package.

This post from Hasin Hayder has been getting a lot of attention lately as well as both positive and negative feedback (check out the comments) on the "I don't give you a damn, if..." method of interviewing.

From Hasin Hayder's original post:

The reason behind writing this blog post is I've interviewed some candidates recently and They dont know the name of the developers of PHP, MySQL or almost any other libraries they make their living on. They dont even know the history of these tools.

Both Vidyut Luther and Chris Shiflett have posted their opinions on the approach, both supporting his ideas noting that good PHP developers are passionate about what they do. That passion usually shows itself in learning as much as they can about the language, both knee deep in code and in finding out about the community around it.

Christopher Kunz thinks a bit differently, however:

I have to ask myself: What are you guys taking? Are you seriously discussing any kind of name-dropping as an interview subject? It's not only irrelevant who created a programming language, it's even a hindrance for interviewers since all that small-talk bullshit takes precious time off the actual knowledge assessment.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.

To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.

They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.

Wez Furlong asks today for any kind of feedback he can get from readers about the Service Data Objects functionality in PHP, specifically questions you might have about them.

One of the things that was apparent was that this SDO stuff has quite a high barrier to entry--too many three letter acronyms for starters, and its origins in the C++ and Java world don't help make it very accessible to the typical PHP developer.

Wez references two articles over on the Zend Developer Zone as great places to get started. He also mentions giving some feedback to the IBM folks about the SDO extension:

If you've wondered what this SDO stuff is all about, please read through those articles. After having done that, if theres something you're not clear on, or if everything is clear, or if you have some other thoughts on the matter, then please take a moment to send your feedback to Graham Charters (you'll find his email address on the top of the articles).

If you're an eZ components fan and have been wondering where you can find some community for these powerful "building blocks" - listen up!

In this new post from Derick Rethans, he shares three different ways to get into the community:

• a mailing list
• the forums on the eZ systems' site
• an IRC channel over on the Freenode network - #ezcomponents.

All three are open to whatever questions, issues, or feedback you're willing to give.

On KillerSoft.com's blog today, there's this new post requesting some feedback on the results of his download numbers - that the front-end packages are getting downloaded quite a bit more.

After reviewing my Zend Download Server logs today for Pearified.com, I was surprised to see that there have been several hundred downloads of the Pearified JavaScript and other "front end" packages. Assuming that some people are downloading all of the packages, and some are downloading them for multiple sites, etc, I figure there are at least 80-100 people who are following (and maybe even using) these packages.

So, silent users, what do you think of this idea?

HE proposes a "socially-enforced" guideline to move these kinds of strings out of the DocumentRoot where the "real" packages go and to their own home, maybe something like a "/webpear" directory...

On Marco Tabini's blog today, there's one of his traditionaly long posts dealing, this time, with "Five things you can do for PHP".

I often hear comments like "I wish I could contribute to PHP… but I really (don't have time|don't have the knowledge|am too shy|insert your favourite meaningless excuse here)".

Contributing to PHP is, I think, perhaps simpler than ordering a hot beverage* at Starbucks. It is, for sure, simpler than most people seem to think, and it requires no skills beyond being… a PHP developer (which is, of course, different from being a "developer of PHP").

If you don't believe me, consider this quick lists of things you can to help improve PHP today.

Items in the list include: "File a bug", "Learn more about what PHP has to offer", and "Celebrate those who work on PHP". He talks about these and the other two in the list in detail, giving more information on how you can get involved. You don't have to work on the PHP core to contribute to the project - all you need to do is have a will to help and a little bit of time...