Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

Matthew Turland set out a while back to develop a bot in PHP. The result of it is Phergie an "an IRC bot written in PHP 5 with an OO API" that can be extended with components for a wide variety of features. Another pleasant offshoot from his project is this first part of two articles on the C7Y community site detailing its creation.

The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.

Matthew talks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.

The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.

Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.

You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.

Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.

I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.

The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The CakePHP podcast "The Show" has released their latest episode, a wrapup of the recent CakeFest 2008 conference that finished a few days ago.

Jeff Loiselle, Nate Abele, Mariano Iglesias, Peter Vanhee, Antonio De Marco, Paul Kruger, Timo Derstappen, Frederic Bollon, and Yann Le Blevac wrap up CakeFest at 1am in the hotel lobby.

You can either grab the mp3 directly or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and other great episodes as they come out. The Show is recorded live and listeners can ask questions of the hosts in real-time via the CakePHP channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The admins over on the PHP-GTK Community site have announced a new resource PHP-GTK ircers can take advantage of - a new bot that hangs out in the #php-gtk channel over on the Freenode IRC network with an aim to be as helpful as possible.

The PHP-GTK.eu community site is now host to an IRC bot named Gataka (for "GTK"), helping users on the Freenode IRC channel for PHP-GTK, at irc://irc.freenode.net/php-gtk.

Currently is has an API interface (for PHP-GTK elements), user tracking and the ability to learn factoids. They're even starting to look for input regarding new features (log publication, in this case).

The Developer Tutorials website has started up a blog and has already posted some great content to it including this new post covering five things that every PHP coder should know about development.

There's always a bridge between textbook knowledge of programming - syntax, procedure etc. - and the real world knowledge that you get from actually developing real applications. Here are five things every PHP developer should be familiar with before they begin developing web applications in PHP

The list is:

• Frameworks
• Templating engines Code availability
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• IRC is a wonderful thing

I'm a particular fan of that last one and regularly hang out in the same ##php channel over on Freenode.

Ben Ramsey has a reminder for those attending this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo (or maybe an incentive for those not yet signed up?) about the Unconference that will be happening in its own space where developers can come and present on their own topics.

When was the last time an event challenged your assumptions, and made you think? The PHP Unconference is a way to bring people who have a shared interest in PHP together. It could be just to explore interest in a common theme or it could be to do work together to accomplish a goal.

This year's chairperson is Patrick Reilly and they've posted some basic principles presenters will need to follow as well as a space on the wiki for topic suggestions or ones you'd like to present on.

You can learn more about this year's conference from the main conference website and stop by the zendcon channel on the Freenode IRC network to meet other attendees.