Ken Guest has posted a review of yet another PHP-related book from APress publishing, "PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Second Edition)".

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.

Jacob Santos has posted a list of things that he both likes and dislikes about one of Zend's beta offerings - Zend Neon.

I've been using Zend Studio Neon for the past three weeks and I have to say, for something that is free (beta software) it is quite good. Compared to using VS 2005, Zend Studio Neon has its advantages, since Visual Studio doesn't handle PHP well. Zend Studio Neon also has areas that I didn't like.

His likes included the fact that it's not Eclipse (technically) and that it supports PHPUnit and PHPDocumentor out of the box. Dislikes included the fact that it might not be free in the future and that it lacks FTP support.

The phpDocumentor project has announced the release of their latest version (a stable!) - phpDocumentor 1.4.0 - on their site today:

The PhpDocumentor team would like to announce the release of PhpDocumentor version 1.4.0 through SourceForge and pear.php.net. This is the first stable feature release since 2006.

This new release adds in functionality for new tags for "magic" properties and methods, some new runtime options (like ignoresymlinks and undocumentedelements) and puts a new memory_limit option on the ini file to help keep it more under control.

You can grab the latest download either through a "pear upgrade" or directly from the project's SourceForge site. Their latest post also includes the complete Changelog for more details on the updates.

Joshua Eichorn has posted a note about an upcoming release of phpDocumentor, version 1.4.0, and how soon it's set to arrive.

The PhpDocumentor team hopes to release the final 1.4.0 stable feature release on 7/20. If you have test-driven any of the recent pre-releases for 1.4.0 (alpha1, alpha2, RC1, RC2), please let us know any good/bad feedback you have from that experience.

Several Changelog entries are http://www.phpdoc.org.

The latest release of the popular PHP documentation tool has been released - phpDocumentor version 1.3.2:

phpDocumentor version 1.3.2 has been released through SourceForge and through pear.php.net. This release is considered stable and is recommended for production usage.

Version 1.3.2 is a bug fix release and is a recommended upgrade for all users. You can upgrade using pear upgrade or downloading the code from SourceForge.

Updates included in this new release include many bugfixes like:

• docBuilder user directory
• INSTALL is wrong and outdated
• Segfault with PHP 5.2
• Fix the error text for Includes without docblock
• CHM default template does not set help file title

Joshua Eichorn makes a request of the community to help out with some testing for the phpDocumentor project:

The phpDocumentor team is just about ready to do a bug fix release. The code is sitting on the server and ready to be uploaded, we just want to get some extra testing done.

If you could install 1.3.2 do your normal documentation run, and leave a note on this post I'd be grateful. The bug fixes have all been tested but you never know what can creep in during the packaging process.

He links to the PEAR download, includes the "pear upgrade" command to install it, and links to the non-PEAR download for the rest of the group.

The ladies over on PHPWomen.org have opened up a new area in their forums - a place to discuss best practices in PHP.

Just a quick note that the Best Practices forum is now open and already has a couple of fast and easy articles in it for your viewing pleasure. For any aspiring writers - there is also a list of future articles if you want to try your hand at it.

There's already a few articles posted including ones discussing PHPDocumentor, spaghetti code, and variable abuse.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of this past week's visitor poll asking "Which Feature Is Not Suitable for phpDocumentor?"

Of the choices, the "None" option got the most votes (33.3% in fact) followed at a large margin by "Fully customizable output with Smarty-based templates" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source". The users have spoken and they think phpDocumentor is flexible enough to handle everything from outputting in HTML/PDF formats to having a web and command-line interface.

This week's poll question asks about something a little more common - which of the items in the list are your favorite PHP game (and yes, there's "All" and "None" options). Check it out and cast your vote today!

The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"

Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.

Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.

In this new post to his blog, Tobias Schlitt shares some VIM tips with the PHP community, specifically about PHP Documentor integration functionality. He's gone back and documented the functionality now to make it that much easier to use.

Because I had a talk about how to use VIM in respect to PHP source code editing, I took the time during the week, to write some extensive documentation for PDV, the PHP Documentor plugin for VIM.

He's also documented the VIM file type plugin as well, and both are available through his SVN of PDV. There's also to updates mentioned - one about splitting up the .vimrc and file type plugin and added the repository to the official SVNServe list making it easy to check out.