On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.

In a new post to his blog today, Eirik Hoem gives an example of using the parse_ini_file function to work with .ini files as configuration for your application.

When doing complex applications it's often nice to have some sort of system for handling settings. PHP has a nice function called parse_ini_file which can be used to create a basic but still usable setting file feature. A simple class which loads the configuration file and offers some methods to retrieve the values for a given key is all that's needed.

His example code gives a sample ini file with database connection information and a MyConfigClass that parses the file and can get or set values in it.

Ken Guest has posted a new book review of Packt Publishing's "Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management":

This book on phpMyAdmin is written by Marc Delisle, one of the core developers of the application which I think just about any software developer utilising MySQL has dabbled with at the least. I can honestly say that anyone that experimented with phpMyAdmin before reading this book will use it much more thoroughly and more productively afterwards.

He includes an overall opinion of the book as well as a specific chapter - the one covering MySQL 5 additions - and his total enjoyment with the contents of the book.

Stuart Herbert has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing covering one of the most popular PHP-based database administration packages out there, phpMyAdmin, "Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management".

Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle is the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books. The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end. It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.

Stuart gives a high-level overview of both phpMyAdmin ("it feels like phpMyAdmin as been around forever") and the book with an index of the topics covered.

In some thoughts related to the just-passed religious holiday, Alan Knowles decided to come up with another series of 7 deadly sins one could commit in their PHP (CMS) development.

Among those on the list are things like:

• Defines for configuration
• Filenaming
• If your code is public, you should try not to ridicule yourself.
• Mixing PHP and HTML

Check out the rest of the post and some of the interesting comments that follow.

The Zend Developer Zone has published their latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions series (as recorded at last year's ZendCon) - Eric David's talk on project management and standards.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Eric David present "Project Management Methods to Maintain IT standards ".

You can either grab the mp3 to listen, use the in-page player or point your favorite aggregator at the feed for the series to get this and the other great episodes.