In a recent post to the Ask About PHP blog, there's a quick "first look" at the CakePHP framework from a beginner's perspective.

Finally, I found some time to take CakePHP for a spin. I've heard some really good things about it, and I've been trying to get some time to try it out. I installed the framework and went through the tutorial on building a simple blog application. I have to say I'm quite impressed.

The post briefly introduces the Model-View-Controller method the framework follows and shows some of the features/benefits it brings with it - the low entry level, its speed, and whether or not it makes for a good "first framework" for other developers.

The CodeUtopia blog asks the online community for their opinion - what do you think of PHP as a first language?

Sometimes I've seen people say PHP is a bad first language, because it teaches bad programming habits. But is this actually true at all? Often those who say that don't really like PHP themselves either, many times because of equally untrue reasons.

They argue both sides of the situation, mentioning what could make for a good first language, why PHP is a "nearly perfect" fit for it and some arguing points for the other side as to why PHP isn't the best option.

This new post on the ThinkPHP blog (from Sarah Hermann) talks about some of her first experiences with the popular IDE from Zend, Zend Studio for Eclipse:

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.

Evert Pot has posted some of his initial impressions of the latest version of PHPUnit that he got his hands on - PHPUnit 3:

For a testing framework I picked PHPUnit. My main reason for picking this was that its fully written in PHP5, it can produce some pretty good reports and the biggest reason is simply because I hear a lot of good stuff about it.

Among his thoughts were mentions of PHPUnit's great documentation (but made it hard to just get started), a bit of unintuitive functionality with the addTestSuite method and some of the pain that it took to get together a full suite of tests.

The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"

Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.

Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.

Tobias Schlitt mentions today in his latest post about his first patch to PHP, an update to the pathinfo function's code being commited.

Hehe, some might say, that those 10 lines of C code are not even worth calling it a patch. Especially, since it was mostly copy and paste work and since Christian Schneider also adviced me for some improvement. Anyway, Marcus just commited my enhancement to pathinfo(), which adds a new field "filename" to the returned array of path elements.

His patch adds a much needed output parameter to the pathinfo function's results - filename. He talks briefly about the process of making the change and how long it took him on the first shot (2 hours), but now his hard work has paid off. The update will be a part of PHP 5.2.

Christopher Kunz has posted this summary of his experiences (so far) at the PHP Vikinger conference for this year.

For about 4 hours now, the PHP Vikinger is in full swing. Everyone arrived between 10 and 11, and together we hacked up a makeshift agenda. Remember that this is an "unconference", so attendees are in full charge of the whole event. Our lead viking Zak, inspired by the mighty power of Thor himself, took it upon him to moderate the scheduling and get everything started. Now, everyone who wants gets up and does a presentation, starts a discussion or - as Kris is currently doing - stipulates brainstorming with the attending core developers and other PHP nerds.

He also mentions a discussion about what PHP's lacking and a talk from Ilia about PHP security issues. Sounds like things are going great so far!

Davey Shafik has this new post today with information about the first Tampa Bay area PHP User Group meeting.

To everybody in the Tampa Bay Area, the Tampa Bay PHP User Group is having its first meeting in just under two weeks.

Brian Fertig whom I have never met, but in our brief e-mails this week seems like a pretty cool guy has gone to the effort of getting things set up for us.

The meeting is going to be held February 17th at 7pm at a Golden Corral there in Tampa. If you'd like to attend, you can RSVP on the Meetup page (so they know how much space to reserve) as well as get more information about the location...

Spurred on by a post on digg.com over the weekend, Kevin Yank has listed out all of the "easter egg" images that are integrated into the actual PHP installation.

An apparent easter egg in some versions of PHP will display a picture of a dog when any PHP script is loaded with a particular query string.

This has been around awhile, but it's news to me.

If you're concerned about the security implications of revealing your PHP version to the masses, be sure to disable the expose_php option in your php.ini file, which also makes this easter egg go away.

While I agree that this is a "neat little toy" to discover with PHP, it does create some potential problems. Thankfully, though, it's easy enough to disable - though those on shared hosting environments might want to make a call to their hosts right now if they have critical apps on their account...

According to this new post on Nexen.net today, there's a plan in the works to gather as much of the Arab PHP community as possible, as being done by the PHP4Arab group.

Friday January 6, 2006, 17h GMT will be the first online meeting of the Arab PHP community as organized by PHP4Arab. The ones in charge of the group/meeting are Hani Gamal and Mokhtar Diab. PHPTunsie.net will be there as well, an established development company to make a speech.

If you'd like to join in, you can head over to this MSN groups page and join up. For complete information on PHP4Arab or the meeting, visit PHP4Arab.org.