The HHVM blog has a new post today sharing the results of their first open source lockdown. During this time they worked to improve not only HHVM itself but how well it supports other open source projects using it as a platform.

The HHVM team has concluded its first ever open source performance lockdown, and we’re very excited to share the results with you. During our two week lockdown, we’ve made strides optimizing builtin functions, dynamic properties, string concatenation, and the file cache. In addition to improving HHVM, we also looked for places in the open source frameworks where we could contribute patches that would benefit all engines. Our efforts centered around maximizing requests per second (RPS) with WordPress, Drupal 7, and MediaWiki, using our oss-performance benchmarking tool.

They share some of the benchmark improvements made by the updates during the session including performance boosts for WordPress & MediaWiki. They also talk about the community involvement during the event and updates made to their own tooling too. The post then spends some time talking about their methodology on development and testing during the lockdown and how the results compare pre- and post-lockdown. The remainder of the post looks at some more specific issues and covers a few technical notes about software used and how the results were reported.

In this new post to thier blog Kinsta shares benchmark results comparing PHP 7 to HHVM, both in their own experience and some shared from other companies too.

A few years ago, engineers at Facebook went on a swashbuckling mission to rebuild the foundation of the world’s most populated social network struggling to sustain acceptable performance levels. PHP was all the rage a decade ago when Facebook was gaining steam and pursuing a global target audience.

As they put it the "competition is getting closer" and the performance gap between the two is growing smaller and smaller. They talk some about the performance improvements and new features that are being worked into PHP 7 and some speculations around a Just-In-Time engine and asynchronous programming features. Then comes the benchmarks. They provide the specifications of the machine they tested on and the results of tests runs of WordPress and Drupal (based on requests per second). The rest of the article talks about two stories from other companies using HHVM, Etsy and WikiMedia, and some of the lessons that have been learned along the way.

On the IBM developerWorks site, there's a tutorial from Vikram Vaswani showing you how to connect to Wikipedia's API in your PHP application. It shows how to fetch, search and update entries through their backend. The tutorial's a little bit older (from May 2011) but the content is still relevant.

Wikipedia is the ultimate online encyclopedia, containing millions of entries on different aspects of human knowledge. Web application developers are able to access and search these entries through the Wikipedia API. This article introduces the Wikipedia API and demonstrates it in the context of a PHP application, explaining how to search and retrieve different elements of Wikipedia content with PHP.

He starts with a general introduction to the API including example feed results and URL request formats. From there he moves into the code - a mostly Zend Framework-driven example that uses the REST client. He shows how to make requests for categories, full-text search, grabbing raw page content and adding/editing the content of pages.

Packt Publishing has made an announcement about a new book that's just been released - "MediaWiki Skins Design" (by Richard Carter).

From their release notes:

This book takes users through customizing their MediaWiki skin. It is full of practical examples of MediaWiki skinning techniques, and provides a clear explanation of how MediaWiki skinning works and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki's appearance.

The book has appeal for both web developers and wiki administrators by helping them update the look and feel of their MediaWiki site. You can find more information on the book on its page on the Packt Publishing website.

If you're a MediaWiki user, the PHP::Impact blog has a list of twenty extensions you don't want to miss out on:

MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture. The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time.

Plugins included in the list are things like:

• SimpleFeed
• Tasks
• CheckUser
• SyntaxHighlight GeSHi

Check out the full list for more great plugins.

In his latest blog post, Sandro Groganz shares some of his finds for useful extensions for WordPress and the MediaWiki platforms.

His list consists of:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-Leftycats
• GoogleMaps
• XFeed

He describes each of them briefly, giving contact information or examples for some.

In his latest blog post, Sandro Groganz shares some of his finds for useful extensions for WordPress and the MediaWiki platforms.

His list consists of:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-Leftycats
• GoogleMaps
• XFeed

He describes each of them briefly, giving contact information or examples for some.

With a bit more formal announcement, Pádraic Brady has posted these details about the resource he's working up, the Patterns for PHP site.

Patterns For PHP is a new project to write and catalogue Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials for PHP programmers. The website is intended as an (advertisement free) online resource for Design Patterns with a focus on PHP implementations.

It is our intention to allow the public edit and contribute freely to its content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions may include Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials, articles demonstrating their use in varying scenarios, contributions on Design Pattern and OOP principles (since these are always applicable), and whatever else a contributor believes would improve the resource.

He also talks about the admin team (himself and 'Ambush Commander') and regular contributors have already started to come in. They've already (in the two weeks they've been live) moved over to a MediaWiki environment and added information for the Singleton, Registry, Factory, Abstract Factory, Strategy, and Composite patterns.

They also want to remind everyone out there, no matter the skill level, that they can contribute their knowledge to the wiki and help the community built another great patterns resource.

With a bit more formal announcement, Pádraic Brady has posted these details about the resource he's working up, the Patterns for PHP site.

Patterns For PHP is a new project to write and catalogue Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials for PHP programmers. The website is intended as an (advertisement free) online resource for Design Patterns with a focus on PHP implementations.

It is our intention to allow the public edit and contribute freely to its content under the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions may include Design Pattern descriptions and tutorials, articles demonstrating their use in varying scenarios, contributions on Design Pattern and OOP principles (since these are always applicable), and whatever else a contributor believes would improve the resource.

He also talks about the admin team (himself and 'Ambush Commander') and regular contributors have already started to come in. They've already (in the two weeks they've been live) moved over to a MediaWiki environment and added information for the Singleton, Registry, Factory, Abstract Factory, Strategy, and Composite patterns.

They also want to remind everyone out there, no matter the skill level, that they can contribute their knowledge to the wiki and help the community built another great patterns resource.

On Pádraic Brady's blog, he gives an update on his "Patterns for PHP" project he's been working up. He's made the move from DocuWiki to MediaWiki for the structure of the site.

As part of the migration, I grabbed a very lightweight theme and implemented my own changes to spruce it up and patch some small errors the original authors made. With some new colouring the result is a clean design with an open space feel and just a feather brush of colour.

I even got around to creating a simple logo to replace the text heading! This slew of changes makes all the difference to how the website is presented, and avoids the overly crowded "I'm an encylopedia!" feel of Wikipedia. Time to start moving to a proper domain...

The patterns site has also been populated with some info already - details on four patterns: Singleton, Registry, Factory, and Abstract Factory.