The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by author Christopher Thomas showing you how, with the help of Twilio, create a Laravel-based application that lets users communicate with it via phone calls.

Twilio is a SaaS application which enables developers to build telephone applications using web technologies. In this two-part series, we will leverage Twilio to build a weather forecast app that is accessed using the telephone system. The backend will be written with the Laravel framework (an exploratory video course is available for purchase here, or in the form of written tutorials here).

In this part, we will create a simple program that will allow a user to call a phone number that we buy from Twilio, enter a zipcode, and receive the current weather forecast.

You'll need to have a Laravel project already set up and a development environment to work in as well as Composer installed versions of Guzzle and the Twilio SDK. With that all set up, he dives right into the code, setting up routes and creating the "Weather" service class. This class is what's used to interact with the Twilio API and respond to user prompts with weather data from the weather.gov API. Next up is the controller that provides the endpoints for Twilio to hit and return the weather data back to their waiting connection. A bit of middleware is set up to sent the Twilio request signature each time and instructions are included on how to test the local system with the public Twilio API (using Ngrok).

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial posted with an interesting idea for the use of PHP - running it on an Android phone (a Laravel application specifically).

It was not that long ago that Christopher Pitt wrote an excellent article about writing and running PHP code on an iPad. After reading it, I thought to myself "It would be really cool to do the same on Android": being able to write and edit code on the fly, for example while traveling, and not having to take the laptop everywhere. So I’ve decided to do some research and see what I could come up with.

For this article, you can use any type of Android device. I’ve done it on my phone, but an Android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard would probably be the ideal setup.

Using the Termux application and using it to install various packages for both development and PHP usage. They also install Vim, Git and Composer to make package management easier. Once the environment is installed it moves on to the Laravel installation (that works just fine), installing SQLite for the database and building out the user authentication and authorization handling with Laravel's "make:auth" artisan command.

On the AjaxRay.com site today there's a new tutorial for the Zend Framework users out there with a library they can use to extend Zend_Form for custom phone number fields.

When taking Phone number as user input, we can worn users about phone number format by setting a hint/description and can validate using Regular Expression. [...] Now, if we try provide this feature in Zend Form, that’s possible. We can create three individual Zend_Form_Element_Text objects and join there value together to make the phone number. But, in this case, validating them together is a hassle.

Instead of separate fields, the library they create makes it simple to handle them as a whole field. It works as a helper for Zend_Form and lets you set things like the separator between the text fields, a "format" string and a validator to apply to their fields (in the example code, it's the "digits" validator). Sample code is included to show you how it fits in your form.

In a recent post o his blog Simon Harris talks about how you can make phone calls and send SMS messages from your PHP applications (well, sort of). He shows how to trigger phone calls and SMS on certain phones by way of an HTML page.

Okay, so you can't really make phone calls and send SMS messages using only HTML; that would be silly. However, if you are developing web sites and web applications for mobile handsets, you can take advantage of some features in XHTML Mobile Profile which make it easy for a user to call a number without typing that number in. You can also use the same mechanism to trigger - on the user's handset - an SMS or MMS dialog with the intended recipient's number and the message content prepopulated.

He includes three examples if it in action (using PHP to render the page) - creating a link to make a call from the HTML, sending an SMS if the text inside a link and doing the same with a MMS message. He uses the WURFL project to make it all work and code snippets are included.

In a recent post to the php|architect site Marco Tabini has a suggestion of five meta-skills he thinks every PHP developer should learn.

But being a PHP developer is much more than writing PHP code. In fact, good PHP skills would be something that I would take for granted that every PHP developer should have—and, if enough employers are as crazy as I am, there’s a chance that I’m not the only one who wants to look beyond mere PHP to decide who is good and who is exceptional.

His list five of meta-skills for the PHP developer covers a wide range of things, not just involving the technology of web development:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Understanding business
• Coming to grips with reality
• Using the phone
• Being humble

In this new post to his blog Vinu Thomas shows how to install an application onto his S60 phone to access his WordPress blog.

I just came across this S60 freeware today which allows me to manage my wordpress blog on my E71. Wordmobi is a Python app which can be used to perform the following tasks on the blog: create/publish new posts, include images in the posts, view/approve comments and delete posts.

You'll need to install Python on the phone before you can get Wordmobi up and running. He includes screenshots for quick blog setup and the resulting listing of posts it pulls in.

Having just received his brand new Neo Freerunner device (a linux-based phone) Derick Rethans did what any other good PHP developer out there would do - he installed PHP on it right away.

As I mentioned, the Freerunner is basically a Linux computer - which means total freedom of what you install on it. Traditionally it comes with perl and python, including GTK bindings. However, no PHP is found on it. I set out to change that. Unfortunately there were some issues with cross compiling, so I decided to compile PHP on the phone. There were some issues with this.

Because the included BusyBox toolset (that emulates much of the traditional Unix tools) didn't have all he needed to compile directly, he compiled the "coreutils" libraries and installed them to the phone. After a few manual tweaks and file copies he had what he needed and ran the compile without issues. He even created a package you can download (a countdown timer) to see if your install is working correctly.

Vinu Thomas talks about a platform on his blog today that can be used to create PHP applications to live on a S60 phone.

If you'd like to work on your favorite PHP apps on your S60 phones, here's PAMP - Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is implemented on the Symbian OS using Open C, which is a set of industry-standard POSIX and middleware C libraries for S60.

The PAMP system is pretty easy to install and guides can be found over on the dev.mobi website to help get you started. You can download the latest version of the project from its SourceForge website.

The Zend Developer Zone is hosting a special event involving the PHP Women's user group - a live podcast as a part of the PHP Abstract series happening December 4th.

PHPWomen.org recently celebrated it's first birthday. To honor the occasion, four of it's prominent members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon have agreed to sit down with me on the phone and talk about PHPWomen.org, it's goals, how well they feel they are achieving them, and why the #phpwomen chat room has nice wallpaper and a couch in it.

Since it is live, listeners are invited to participate too through two methods - via IRC on the Freenode network and on a toll-free number to call in. And, as Cal puts it: "if you ask a good question and they answer it on the podcast, I'll send you one of the new elePHPants!"

You can get full details on the podcast from this post on the Zend Developer Zone's site.

The Zend Developer Zone is hosting a special event involving the PHP Women's user group - a live podcast as a part of the PHP Abstract series happening December 4th.

PHPWomen.org recently celebrated it's first birthday. To honor the occasion, four of it's prominent members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon have agreed to sit down with me on the phone and talk about PHPWomen.org, it's goals, how well they feel they are achieving them, and why the #phpwomen chat room has nice wallpaper and a couch in it.

Since it is live, listeners are invited to participate too through two methods - via IRC on the Freenode network and on a toll-free number to call in. And, as Cal puts it: "if you ask a good question and they answer it on the podcast, I'll send you one of the new elePHPants!"

You can get full details on the podcast from this post on the Zend Developer Zone's site.