Zeev Suraski of Zend has a post on his personal site asking the developers and community out there for any interesting PHP stories they might be willing to share.

Do you have an interesting story that involves PHP? Something awkward, unexpected or inspiring that happened to you or that you witnessed that was related to PHP and/or its community? Did PHP help you meet your spouse, otherwise change your life or enable you to change other people's lives?

I have no doubt that there's some interesting stories out there. If you're one of the many that has one (even if you don't think it's that interesting it might be to others) you can find his contact information on the post to share it.

Matt Stauffer has a post to his site sharing a few things he didn't know Laravel could do as discovered during his work on his book Laravel Up & Running.

It turns out that there's a long road between "I have a book contract" and "I know everything there is to know in order to write this book."

It doesn't matter how much of an expert you feel like. It doesn't matter how much time you've spent learning and teaching. Across the board, every tech author I've talked to has described just how much they learned—had to learn—when they wrote a book.

I learned a lot in writing Laravel: Up and Running. And I want to share it with you.

He includes a list of four of the interesting things he learned during his writing:

• The Cookie Facade is one special cookie
• Attaching files to emails is easier than you think
• You can chain more Scheduler methods than the docs show
• You can assert that a view gets passed certain data

Each item also comes with a brief code example showing it in action. If you'd like more information about the book and a free sample, be sure to sign up using the form in the post or you can just pre-order the book and get the whole thing as soon as it's released.

Brandon Savage has posted about some interesting things he's come across when working with the DateTime objects in PHP 5.3 including working with timestamps and differences in terms of days/months/etc.

Over time, the PHP DateTime object has become one of the best objects available to PHP developers. This object has grown since early PHP 5 into a robust class that has the ability to do lots of great things. Recently, I was exploring some of the functionality provided by the DateTime object as of PHP 5.3 (and wishing that Ubuntu had PHP 5.3 as a package distribution). Here are some of the new things in PHP 5.3 that are really cool.

He mentions the "add()" and "sub()" methods you can use on an object to get information about the dates/times forward and backwards, the "diff()" to get the differences between two dates and the get/setTimestamp methods to get the current time (or set it).

In this new post to his blog Davey Shafik looks at a problem plaguing several mailing lists out there (including some of the PHP ones) - that they're a "free for all". What's his solution to help it? Karma.

In the real world, communications pass through a hierarchy of people, escalating as necessary, passing from person to person up the chain. This means that, given enough time, any mailing list starts to have a large noise:signal ratio, at least for any given person’s take on the list; they want to read what they want to read, and don’t need to be distracted ignoring the stuff they don’t want to read.

His solution involves defining a hierarchy for the lists and the karma attached to them (based on user CVS level or a timescale or other measurement) to allow the "more interesting" things to filter back up to the correct places. His examples use some of the PHP lists as a sample structure.

Ever wanted to know more about the individuals in the PHP community around you? You're in luck! The "Seven Things" meme has been zipping its way through the PHP community with some great results. I've tried to get together a list of the posts made so far - it's not going to get them all, but its a start. Those linked in the top list are ones tagged and with a blog post. The normal list at the bottom are those that are tagged but haven't gotten around to writing their Things:

And here's the slackers:

• Joe LeBlanc
• Ed Finkler
• Greg Beaver
• Bill Karwin
• Terry Chay
• Aaron Wormus
• Graham Christensen
• Nate Abele
• Max Horvath
• Johanna Cherry
• Beth Tucker
• Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Marc de Visser
• Joe Stagner
• Ralph Schindler
• Wil Sinclair
• Barry Austin
• FoxyDot
• Eric David
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• John Coggeshall
• Stas Malyshev
• Gaylord Aulke
• David Coallier
• Joe Stump
• Josh Eichorn
• Harry Fuecks
• Jeff Moore

If you're one of the ones that hasn't posted yet and you get around to it or if I've left someone's post out of the list, let me know and I'll update the list.

Richard Davey points out two new interesting PHP commands he discovered when looking through the graphics (GD) section of the manual - imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

Richard Davey points out two new interesting PHP commands he discovered when looking through the graphics (GD) section of the manual - imagegrabscreen and imagegrabwindow.

Upon further investigation both of these commands can be used to take screen shots of the desktop of your server, or any applications window (such as a web browser). Both commands are listed as being "Windows only" and also possibly only in CVS, but I found both of them are in the 5.2.3 standard release and compile without error. However at the moment neither appear to actually do anything other than return fully black images

In testing the functionality, though, his only results were black screens and images instead of the expected image results.

Harry Fuecks mentions an interesting project today on the SitePoint Blog - CouchDb - a stand-alone document store, accessible via XML REST.

Firing up the CouchDb server on Windows is a breeze—follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new http extension which is most easily done on Win32 by grabbing the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules.

The interface between CouchDb and PHP is REST - XML + HTTP - you can also point your browser directly at the CouchDb server (default - localhost:8080) and get around with a little help from the CouchDb wiki.

So, if it's Just Another Database, why should we pay attention? Harry notes (with a code example) that it's more about how it stores the information and not just that it does. His example takes in a POST request from a form and pushes it (raw data) into the CouchDb functions. He also gives an example of where this would be handy - in a wiki (like Dokuwiki) where the files are currently stored on the filesystem instead of in a database.

Harry Fuecks mentions an interesting project today on the SitePoint Blog - CouchDb - a stand-alone document store, accessible via XML REST.

Firing up the CouchDb server on Windows is a breeze—follow the README. PHP-wise, you need the new http extension which is most easily done on Win32 by grabbing the most recent PHP 5 release (5.1.6) and the corresponding collection of PECL modules.

The interface between CouchDb and PHP is REST - XML + HTTP - you can also point your browser directly at the CouchDb server (default - localhost:8080) and get around with a little help from the CouchDb wiki.

So, if it's Just Another Database, why should we pay attention? Harry notes (with a code example) that it's more about how it stores the information and not just that it does. His example takes in a POST request from a form and pushes it (raw data) into the CouchDb functions. He also gives an example of where this would be handy - in a wiki (like Dokuwiki) where the files are currently stored on the filesystem instead of in a database.