On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti has posted about test-driven design, specifically with the Symfony framework.

Symfony is one of the few PHP frameworks that gives you basic tools for starting to write tests. [...] Symfony also provides an extension of this class called sfTestBrowser, designed especially for functional tests, which has all the abilities of the sfBrowser object plus some smart assert methods.

He uses this sfTestBrowser object to run an example test on a same get() call's response. It should match the regular expression of "/This is a temporary page/" but doesn't so it fails. Writing up tests like this for new parts of your application first would be considered test-driven development and the Symfony framework makes that simple.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article/tutorial showing how to keep things in sync on your Drupal installation with the help of Adobe AIR.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).

Padraic Brady is on part five of his series looking at making a blogging tool with the Zend Framework today. This time he focuses on the database side of things, working with models and making an admin module.

First of all I decided to add an Entries Model and Authors Model to the mix, primarily to get ready for when we can add new entries to our blog. This leads to where we can create new Entries; we add an Administration Module to the application with it's own distinct Layout.

He starts by making the database schema, an entries and authors table, before starting in on the models. They're made based off of the Zend_Db component's structure and they let the application interact with the data in the tables easily. His code for the modules is included as well as the controller and view for the admin module.

On DevShed today, they continue their look at uploading files in PHP with the addition of some error handling features for their current script.

In this third tutorial of the series, I'm going to show you how to incorporate a brand new error checking module into the file uploading PHP script created in the last article.

They show the basic method - uploading with no error checking - before showing how much help adding in an error checking component to watch for things like files that are too large, invalid file choices and problems writing the file on the server side.

In a quick new blog post to the NorthClick blog, Soenke Ruempler points out that, due to some updates made by Rob Richards, the Spread extension for PECL is back in working order again.

Yesterday I got an e-mail that two of my PECL bug reports for the spread module have been fixed. It seems that it gets some recent love from Rob Richards who commited some fixes and cleanups.

The Spread functionality allows developers to create messaging services by acting as a message bus between the clients and between the client/servers.

Hasin Hayder has provided some instructions he's created to install the Imagick extension for PHP on a Ubuntu linux system (7.10) in a new blog entry.

I already have ImageMagick installed in my machine and I tried to install the Imagick extension for PHP but I was stuck with strange errors. I have spent couple of hours today to figure out what I did wrong and Why I cant build that extension. Finally I've figured out that I must install ImageMagick from source first to build that extension. Heres how to.

He walks through the install, talking about where to get the package from, where to get the PECL extension for PHP and the compile process (with the result of a .so file PHP's extension can use).