The Zend Developer Zone has a new post with information about some updates from the WordPress project about what plugin authors must do to be compliant with the rules of the WordPress Plugin Directory.

After five years, the WordPress plugin team has updated the Plugin Guidelines. These are the guidelines that WordPress plugin authors must comply with to be included in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The guidelines were soft-launched last month so that they could be vetted by the larger plugin developer community community. On November 1st, 2017, they were officially announced “Revised Guidelines Are Live” by Mika Epstein.

Overall, these guidelines are good. They are solid, well communicated and clear to anyone who reads them.

The ZDZ post focuses in on just two of the guidelines that were updated with a few brief thoughts in each:

• #4. Keep your code (mostly) human readable
• #9, The plugin and its developers must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive

They point out that, while the intent is good for #9, the term "morally offensive" is very broad and could be interpreted in many ways by many different groups.

In this post to his site Phillip Shipley talks about Docker and how using it for your PHP deployments can make it much easier to upgrade to PHP 7.

Last year at php[tek] 2015 during the hack time I messed around and created a Docker image to run and test PHP7. It was surprisingly easy and I quickly learned that the app I was working on at the time ran fine in PHP7, good deal. So since then I’ve been awaiting the general availability release of PHP7 to move forward with upgrading my apps.

The main thing holding me back was I just didn’t want to maintain an image based on compiling from source. Not that it’s a problem, it just didn’t feel as clean and simple as using supported packages.

He points out that Ubuntu 16.04 was released and that does now have PHP 7 as a standard package so he's happily upgrading. He gets into a bit of detail about how upgrade process and some of the smaller issue he faced along the way. He also includes the update to his Dockerfile he made to change to PHP 7 (only a few characters) to rebuild with PHP 7.0.4.

On the Symfony blog today they've officially announced the Symfony Best Practices initiative that's being ramped up to help provide a solid resource for Symfony developers and guide them towards more correct development within the framework (and its components).

Since the publication of Symfony 2.0, the Symfony Community has created an unofficial set of recommendations for developing Symfony2 applications. Unfortunately, a lot of these recommendations are in fact wrong. They unnecessarily overcomplicate things and don't follow the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony.

This guide, soon to be published at http://symfony.com/best-practices will share 31 of the best practices gathered by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz from their own experience and the practices the community has found along the way. The things in this guide will be optional, not required, to make Symfony-based applications work, so don't worry if you're not following them exactly.

According to this new post on the main PHP-GTK project's website, they've officially made the move over to github:

Although the main PHP-GTK site at http://gtk.php.net/ does not (yet ?) make mention of it, development of PHP-GTK is still active, but is using a more recent infrastructure, having moved to Github like many other projects.

You can find this new repository at https://github.com/php/php-gtk-src. The PHP-GTK project is an extension for the PHP programming language that implements language bindings for GTK+. It provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions and greatly simplifies writing client-side cross-platform GUI applications.

In this new post to his blog Johannes Schlüter shows you how to easily set up a development environment for the recently moved PHP repositories (to git) using "out of tree" builds to keep versions and configurations separate.

As PHP has moved to git recently everybody who works on the PHP source has to recreate his work environment. When working on PHP I have a few requirements for my working dirs. For one I want to be able to use different branches (like 5.3, 5.4 and master) at the same time and I want to quickly test different PHP configurations, like builds using thread-safety or debug mode on or off.

He includes a set of commands you can use to to clone the new repository and create different working directories for the different kinds of builds that you want to install. He also points out as a shell script on github.

On the PHPClasses blog today the question is posed "can .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation?" (relating to the use of the Phalanger tool to compile PHP down to .NET assemblies.

Recently Phalanger 3.0 was released introducing numerous improvements in terms of compatibility with the PHP 5.3, interoperability with .NET platform implementations including Mono on Linux, and probably most importantly performance improvements. [...] What motivated this article was that a PHP developer named Rasmus Schultz went on the php.internals mailing list and proposed to switch the official PHP implementation based on Zend for another based on Phalanger.

The post includes some benchmarking results of requests made to a WordPress instance running on various PHP platforms. The Phalanger version came in around 2 seconds faster (average, obviously) than the PHP FastCGI setup. Also included are two suggestions for future PHP versions (v6 anyone?) that could help the language perform even better: Thread-safety for running with less memory waste and the inclusion of a JIT (Just in time compiler - of which a few are mentioned specifically.

According to this new post on CodeIgniter.com, EllisLab is announcing an official fork of the current CodeIgniter framework that will be driven by a group of six community members.

Yes, you read that right, EllisLab will be creating a CodeIgniter fork. For you. By you. We need six talented, opinionated, critical coders from the community who have a heavy personal and/or professional interest in CodeIgniter's ongoing development to act as deputies for the repository. [...] You can also nominate someone else for one of the six seats by emailing the above information on their behalf.

EllisLab will be going over the applications for the next few weeks and may ask the community to help them narrow things down. An NDA will have to be signed by the selected group and a rollout of this new fork is planned for sometime in Q1 of 2011.

The Debuggable Blog has posted the announcement about the release of the final schedule for this year's CakeFest being released:

our beloved "CakeFest" - is announced! For those of you who don't know about the event yet, here is a little wrapup. The next and third CakeFest will be held in Berlin, hometown of Debuggable! From July 9-12, people from all over Europe and the rest of the world will travel to Germany in order to celebrate and learn about the best PHP framework there is.

The conference will run from July 9th through the 12th with two days of workshops and two days of the actual conference. You can find out more details on the whens and wheres from the official conference website.

Following up on the previous announcement about the date for the PHP North West conference, Lorna Mitchell has posted some more specific information to her blog:

Last night at the PHPNW user group we announced this year's conference - PHPNW09. We don't have a lot of detail but here is a run-down of all the information I have.

The conference will be held at the Manchester Conference Center this year (changed from last year) with the (currently) estimated pricing for Early Bird tickets coming in at 50 GBP (+VAT) until September 10th.

Keep an eye on the conference's main website for more information as it becomes available.

The MTA group has officially released the main website for this year's CodeWorks traveling PHP "roadshow".

Welcome! CodeWorks 2009 is a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine. CodeWorks will travel to seven locations across the United States between September 22nd and October 5th included. Each two-day event includes a day of in-depth tutorials and a day of conference talks arranged across three different tracks, all presented by the best experts in the business.

Each of the stops along the conference route (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, New York) will be limited to 300 attendees in each location and pricing will start at $99 for the Early Bird tickets. You can find out more information about signing up on this page of the CodeWorks site.