Now that we're in to May, there's only one thing on a PHPer's mind (well some of them out there) - testing! This month several groups all around the world have set times for their own TestFests to dedicated time to writing up tests for PHP.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. [...] All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests.

Several groups have set up their times (here's the list) including teh Atlanta PHP group's happening today and the Cologne/Bonn user group's happening tomorrow. If you want to get in on the action and haven't found a group, check out the list and see if there's one nearby and join up before the event starts!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a checklist as a reminder of things to bring with you to your local event.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).

Ilia Alshanetsky posts today about the proposed "Month of PHP bugs" that Stefan Esser is proposing:

It would be interesting to see what issues he discovers, hopefully most of them have already been reported to the PHP Security Team, in which case the upcoming 5.2.1 release will provide a resolution path for affected users.

Hopefully, as Ilia states, the bugs will not turn out to be zero-day vulnerabilities and will instead be smaller issues. Either way, a bug-fix patch will probably soon follow.

Either way, I have to look at this as a free security audit of PHP by someone with a clue about security and ultimately, in the long run it will only make PHP better, even if March is going to be rather busy.

In part of an effort to work out some of the 'kinks' in PHP (as far as the security of the language itself), Stefan Esser has proposed a "Month of Bugs" for PHP. The idea is to release security issues found, one for each day - the month's hasn't been specified yet - with complete vulnerability information.

While it is true that many PHP applications are written by people with no clue about security it is absolutely not true that PHP is a secure programming language. I think it is necessary to make ALL people aware of this.

No word yet on when this month will start, but we will keep you posted as soon as it's out. If you'd like to check out the community's response to this effort, check out some of the comments already posted to this announcement on the PHP Security Blog.