On the 7php.com site today there's a new interview in their PHP community series, a talk with Stuart Herbert of the Phix project:

In this edition I talked with Stuart Herbert (@stuherbert), a highly highly and highly experienced software engineer. His interview is packed with insights and experienced thoughts. Herbert is one of those rare experienced geek who also teaches the principles of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Stuart has been involved in almost everything out there in the Programming sphere; he’s a conference speaker, author of books, author for magazine articles, does pod-casts, volunteer developer for Gentoo Linux, contributor and lead to open-source PHP software like PHIX, has been a founder of the University of Sheffield’s Computer and Software Society growing it to over 1,800 members, and so much more as you will read below.

Questions include how he got started with PHP, his opinion of the language now versus when he started, advice to budding PHP developers and what tools he likes and uses. They also talk about his thoughts on conferences, ORMs, traits and the balance between good engineering and good management.

Stuart Herbert has put together a series of posts detailing how to get the Phix component creation and management tool installed on various operating systems.

Phix makes it extremely easy to create and maintain your own PEAR-installer compatible components for reuse in your PHP applications. Installation takes just seconds, and it's both open-source and framework-agnostic!

The OS guides help you get it installed for:

• OSX
• Fedora
• Ubuntu
• Debian
• CentOS

For more information about Phix (including helpful "getting started" details) check out the project's website.

In a new post to his blog Stuart Herbert has introduced phix, a packaging tools that can be used to manage and install different components in a framework-agnostic sort of way.

phix is a small command-line tool for PHP applications. I created it to fix (pun intended) the problem of how to easily automate the tasks involved in creating and (especially) maintaining components. These tasks aren’t built into phix; they are commands that ship with the phix distribution. You can create your own commands to run inside phix too, and it’s easy to do so

The phix tool (easily installed from PEAR) lets you either use built-in commands or custom ones to manage libraries with a few different kinds of commands - current status, initialize a library, upgrade a library and manage the full web application. As of the time of this post, the current version is phix-0.10.4.