In a new post today, Michael Kimsal walks through the procoess he followed to try and get the most optimized testing environment he could around a WordPress installation he already has set up.

I've recently been working on a project trying to take an existing customized wordpress site and create automated integration tests around parts of it. I'm using phpUnderControl, phpUnit, Selenium RC, Firefox, Xvfb (virtual frame buffer) and...well, I think that's it.

He mentions the two issues he came across, both with the WordPress software (the "siteurl" setting and the pathing for the templates). He recommends that application code be portable to avoid problems like these. Applications that can be dropped in anywhere and "just work" can help not only make life easier for the installer but also for the tester.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted a review of one of Wrox Press' latest PHP-related offerings, "Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP" (by >Jamie Sirovich and Cristian Darie).

I'd like to say that this book has changed my way of thinking about SEO Professionals, but it hasn't. It has, however, given me enough information so that I can make my own projects more SE friendly and allow me to help my friends do the same.

Cal talks about the contents of the book, including his favorite chapter (chapter 2) that gives a quick-hit primer to the world of search engine optimization. The rest of the book is divided up into specialization topics inside of SEO like "SE Friendly URLs", "Duplicate Content" and "Link Bait". Plus, check out what Cal has to say about one of the Appendixes...

In another report from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Kevin Yank has covered Rasmus Lerdorf's talk - "Getting Rich with PHP 5" - a look at building rich web applications in PHP5.

PHP's creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, gave a surprising talk on building PHP rich web applications using PHP5-suprising, because fully half the talk focused on low-level PHP optimization techniques. The slides are available online.

Kevin gives an overview of the talk, mentioning some of Rasmus' examples, the bottlenecks he defined, and the time spent on the new functionality in the PHP 5 series.

Dublish.com has this post from a little while back with some good tips on how to squeeze the most out of your MySQL and PHP scripts with some simple, handy tips.

The MySQL list includes things like:

• MySQL is interpreted from right to left so you should put the most significant limiters as far to the right as possible.
• Use indexes on the columns in the WHERE clause and on the columns you want to ORDER BY.
• Sometimes mysql_free_result() end up wasting more memory than it saves. Check the difference with memory_get_usage().
• Use NOT NULL as default value as much as you can, it speeds up execution and saves one bit.

And the PHP list includes:

• When echoing strings it's faster to separate them by comma instead of dot.
• Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
• Many code blocks might slow down the interpretation a little bit.

There's also all sorts of other tips down in the comments as well.

On the blog at HackersCenter.com, there's a new post looking a a few simple ways to help optimize your PHP code. Sure, most of the everyday scripts developers write don't benefit a whole lot from shaving off those extra milliseconds in execution time, but it's always a good practice to get into when you get into those larger scripts.

Php optimization is the skill of fine tuning an application to extract maximum performance with minimum server load. Many of my clients in the past have wondered why I spend extra hours just to get the script execution time to be cut down by 1 second.

However if you consider an average large scale application, it would receive about 1000 unique visitors an hour (approximation based on average statistics for my clients websites) and an average of about 8 page views per user. This would mean that your server would face 8000 requests for that page every hour.

The author follows this up with a few more stats before getting on with the heart of the article - the tips and tricks. They demonstrate a sample function to help test the speed of the script before looking at different topics of optimization - outputting an array, regular expressions, using references, and file inclusion. For each, there's a "slow way" and a "fast way" - I wonder which is the better choice...

The IBM developerWorks site has posted part one of a new series - using PHp o build a search engine optimization application.

PHP, a dynamic Web-based programming language, takes a variety of input formats and uses a built-in SOAP client to obtain information from the Web. PHP, combined with applications using search engine optimization (SEO), is a powerful tool for obtaining information from major search engines, allowing this information to guide a webmaster's online marketing and SEO strategies. Find out how to take advantage of these strategies by building the back end of an application to monitor and track your client's SEO efforts.

The application takes in CSV files that contain keyword and domain combinations. The positions on each of the search engines is generated from these. You'll need a bit of prior PHP knowledge to work through it and you'll need a place where a web server, PHP, a database, and Java are installed.