In this post to his site Joe Ferguson takes a look at the recently announced Producer package that helps with ensuring your packages are "high quality" and makes the release process easier.

Producer is a pretty neat project that wants you to release higher quality packages. Well, actually (sorry) it’s “a command-line tool to validate, and then release, your PHP library package. It supports Git and Mercurial for version control, as well as Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket for remote origins.”

[...] I was immediately interested in this tool because the Phergie project I manage (with other awesome developers) contains a number of individual packages. [...] Phergie packages are pretty solid. We have Travis CI running our tests across multiple PHP versions, we have hours and hours into these packages. But I wanted to take it to the next level, step up our game so to speak. In order to help raise our quality control on our packages I needed a producer.

He uses a Phergie plugin he developed as an example to try out Producer. He shows the results of the validate call with Producer and the few issues it reports. He shares the updates he made to the code (documentation) and the addition of a CHANGES.md file to the repository.He then uses Producer to push out a new version of the package using the release command (v3.0.1) and the resulting output of the command.

Cees-Jan Kiewiet has posted a tutorial to his site showing how to connect Phergie to Slack through a custom gateway. Phergie is a popular PHP open source IRC bot project in use in several channels on the Freenode.net IRC network.

Ever since the rise of Slack and the Phergie v3 connecting them has been on my to do list. And while Slack API is the better alternative this was fun nontheless.

He walks you through some of the prerequisites for the setup including a working installation of the Phergie bot (installations instructions not included). From there he helps you make the custom Gateway and make a user for the bot to operate under. He then includes the settings and configuration you'll need to configure on the bot to allow it to join the Slack instance.

7PHP.com has posted another interview with a PHP community member - this time it's with Matthew Turland, one of the co-author's of SitePoint's "PHP Master: Write Cutting Edge Code" and known speaker/author.

In this edition I talked with [Matthew Turland @elazar], co-author of the PHP book ‘PHP Master:Write Cutting Edge Code‘. He currently works as a Senior Platform Engineer for Synacor Inc. Matthew was also a former technical editor for php|architect Magazine, contributor to the Zend Framework project and has spoken at conferences like ZendCon and php|tek. On the FOSS side, Turland is the man behind the Phergie project – a PHP-based IRC bot.

His answers talk about things like:

• What kind of environment (and tools) he uses for his development
• His work on the Phergie IRC bot project
• Resources he recommends for those new to the language
• What software he recommends/appreciates
• Some of the good and bad about conferences he's attended And a recommendation to check out the PHP Mentoring project for more guidance

php|architect has published the latest episode in their "oddWeek" podcast series today - episode 5 with an interview with Matthew Turland.

This week we talk with Blue Parabola Alumni Matthew Turland about the awesomeness that is Phergie [an IRC bot developed in PHP].

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - you can either listen via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to the php|architect feed to get this and other great news and articles from the site.

Matthew Turland came across someone having an issue running his PHP-based IRC bot (Phergie) an an environment where the exec function wasn't allowed:

This causes a warning in the Quit plugin, which uses exec to automatically detection of the full path to the PHP CLI binary on non-Windows systems that it will later use that path to initiate a new PHP CLI process to "restart" the bot.

It check this setting for the future, it was recommended that he look at the SPL ReflectionFunction class (a part of the Standard PHP Library) that would let him check the disabled status of any PHP function (looking at the result of the isDisabled call).

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.

Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.

I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.

The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.