Stoyan Stefanov has reposted an article he wrote for the PHP Advent (now Web Advent) site with a tongue-in-cheek look at how to write unmaintainable code in PHP applications.

With the unemployment rates lately being at the levels that they are, everybody realizes that job security is important. And what's the best way to keep a job but to be irreplaceable, one way or another. The simple truth is that if no one can maintain the code you write, you have a job for life. Writing unmaintainable code is a special skill that, strangely enough, seem to come quite naturally to certain developers. But for the rest of you, here are some tips and hints to get you started.

He humorously suggests poor practices in your development such as:

• starting your new job by being vocal about "shifting paradigms" and "enterprise" code
• making it impossible for someone to change one thing without effecting another
• ban coding conventions
• don't write unit tests
• not use templating

...and more. It's a funny piece that has a good message behind it. It's a perfect example of what not to do in development (and what to avoid if you're not doing them currently). The interesting thing is that this was originally published in 2009 and just about all of the points in it are still valid today.

As anyone who subscribes to the php.internals mailing list knows, there can be a lot of drama around some of the discussions for the future of the language, both in its features and surrounding technical concerns. Daniel Cousineau has posted a lighter take on some of this drama and is issuing his own "RFC" for a proposed mascot for internals - the DramaLlama.

Branding and PR is an increasingly important factor in programming language viability and adoption. Visible instability in the core team is off-putting to large organizations who depend on long term reliability and support and only encourages them to look to languages and tools with more stable and professional core teams. This RFC proposes that the PHP core team get ahead of the issue and introduce a logo, separate from the public facing project, to provide a sense of professionalism that is lacking. I humbly submit the DramaLlama as the superior candidate.

His proposed mascot, shown here, bears the PHP logo on the side of a cartoon purple llama. As Daniel puts it, the llama is a "proud, capable animal" that can deal with a lot and still stand up under a heavy burden.

By not adopting a logo, the PHP core team risks losing the respect and trust of the end user community. However it could be argued that the core team has survived without this and could do so indefinitely.

The post is practically dripping with sarcasm, but it's a good mood-lightener around some of the drama that can come from the clash of multiple personalities in the PHP internals community.

A new blog has started up that mentions some of the "masterpieces" that occur in the PHP manual - phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com:

Sparkling gems found in the official PHP documentation, mostly in the user-submitted comments. Not meant to pick on anyone, just to serve as a source of wonderment.

There's already several posts to the blog including:

• Here's my int, so cast it maybe
• Two quotes that make me sad
• Two's Complewhat
• The documentation clearly says raptors

You can subscribe to their RSS feed if you'd like to keep up.

There's a lot of lists out there that will tell you how to get the most out of your WordPress website, but this list is a little different. In this list Chris Roane gives you 150 ways that you can ruin your WordPress site (so that, hopefully, you can avoid them).

Here are some obvious and not so obvious ways to ruin your WordPress website. Some of these will also destroy the relationships with your family and friends. In fact, I guarantee that if you follow these 150 simple steps, you will have a horrible WordPress website and very few friends.

His list includes some "useful" suggestions like:

• Constantly change your permalink structure without creating 301 redirects. Google will love you for this.
• Put a bunch of keywords at the bottom of your page, making the font color match the background.
• Add music that auto plays on your website. Do not provide a way to turn it off.
• Make sure your contact and comment form are broken. If someone points this out to you, tell them it is because you get so much traffic.
• Display a different main navigation menu on every page load.
• Focus 100% on SEO, but don’t worry about how your visitors feel about your site.
• Make some of your text look like links, but they are not click able.
• Require everyone who visits your website to first download a pirated eBook.
• Claim you have the #1 position for a popular search engine keyword.

And, of course, the most useful suggestion of them all - "Don’t update your plugins or WordPress installation...ever."

On the PseudoCoder blog Matt has a new post - "PHP is a spork, Not a City Destroying Monster":

Here’s an FJM style breakdown of Carl McDade's well thought out and persuasive article ("PHP is a skill, not a profession"). Haha...no really it's just flamebait crap.

Matt makes light of a lot of the things said in the Hiveminds article, including Carl's comments about the importance of PHP and how it compares to Carl's language of choice, ASP.NET.