On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing a workflow developed by Bill Clark that makes searching the PHP documentation with the Alfred tool easier.

PHP Docs workflow for Alfred by Bill Clark is a workflow for searching the PHP documentation from Alfred directly. The PHP Docs workflow code builds on Till Krüss’ Laravel Docs Workflow for Alfred that we recently covered.

[...] You can search the PHP documentation by opening up Alfred and prefixing your search with “php” and then the search term.

They give an example of how to search the documentation and a screenshot of the resulting list. You can find out more and get this Alfred workflow for yourself over on the GitHub repository for the project.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a guide to help you maximize your terminal productivity by sharing a few tips to help you get the most of out the time you spend at the command line.

This week, we just published some great bash aliases from the community, and I wanted to write more about maximizing your terminal productivity. I’ve coached many developers, and the terminal is often the area I see that many great developers (much better than me) could improve and gain some productivity and better tooling.

After talking about his own first steps as a developer and the tools he used, Paul Redmond talks about the set of helpful tools and software he now uses including:

• the Zsh shell (and Oh My Zsh)
• updating the CD Path
• Using path expansion
• History completion
• History search and execution
• Terminal themes

He ends the post with a few other recommendations of resources to check out and quick tips on sharing the results.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a recommendation for all of the developers (really, anyone) out there about their work habits - want to be more productive? Work less.

There are many people (myself included for a long time) that will work more and more when they have more stress. Whether it’s a deadline or simply too much work on your hands, you just start working longer, open your laptop when at home just to finish that one feature, skip lunch or ignore your RSI-breaks. While this may sometimes work, in the long run, this will only make you less productive.

He talks about a few things that can come with "more work" that can make you less productive in the long run. He includes a few recommendations to help "take back that productivity" including:

• Take breaks
• Take regular days off
• Holidays are good
• Don't always work from the office
• Do "fun" work

He also points out that a lot of your level of productivity revolves around stress and how even just changing small things like where you're working from can make a real difference.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a recent post from Bruno Skvorc sharing some PHPStorm productivity "hacks" and shortcuts you can use during your development in this popular IDE.

We all have our favorite IDEs/editors when coding. Mine is PhpStorm, and it took a while to master all its shortcuts and establish a rapid workflow. In this article, I’ll share some keyboard shortcuts and tips with you which you should make part of your regular routine if you, too, do your work in this IDE. This article was partially inspired by this Reddit thread, and will be mentioning and demonstrating some of the shortcuts found there as well.

He breaks it up into three main categories with several points each, some with (animated) screenshots:

• Keyboard shortcuts and hacks
• Using Plugins
• Dark themes for readability

Oscar Merida has shares some of his thoughts about measuring developer productivity inspired by a recent article covering the same topic.

My friend Sandy shared a link to a fascinating natural experiment comparing the productivity of two similarly tasked developer teams. If you haven’t read it already, take a minute to check it out. I’ve seen this need for visibility throughout my career. [...] if you want to measure actual productivity, in terms of what tasks your development team what can you do? This is where I think a good habit of issue+SCM tracking, rigorous testing , and continuous integration can really shine.

He also talks about a few of the bad practices some companies get in the habit of using to represent this same metric including "butts in seats" time and the totals of billable hours. He suggests a better alternative is measuring things like issues addressed in your bug tracker and ongoing performance metrics from a continuous integration system.

Matt Setter has a quick new post that suggests a way you can get more done with less work - simplicity.

Though we can do so many things simultaneously – should we? Does it actually reduce effectiveness and productivity which are the antithesis of professional application development? [...] I had the thought, as is common in a western-based mentality, that to be busy, to be industrious, to try and multi-task a series of independent tasks and projects simultaneously was the right thing to do. It’s meant to be a simple formula: "Greater productivity = Greater self-worth right?" Sounds almost like Thatcherism. I felt that this was not only right, but the sign of an intelligent and sophisticated developer, who truly had honed his craft. Perhaps you’ve felt the same at one time or another?

He points out that, while it's very easy for developers to fall into this trap and way of thinking, it's not sustainable. It leads to stress, bad code and even - possibly - an even higher bug count. Instead he suggests the good standby idea of "KISS" (essentially, simplicity).

Instead of trying to do everything at once – I stopped and decided to only do one thing at once. And that one thing, had my full attention and focus. When it was done, I then moved on to the next one. Not before and not after.

He includes some of his own experience trying to apply this in a Zend Framework 2 application.

Jason Gilmore has put together a list of sixteen best practices and tools you can use to help make your PHP development life easier and the quality of your code better.

[I spent so] much time in fact that in 2010 I penned more than 130 articles. Many of these articles focused on PHP-specific best practices and productivity, two topics which should resonate closely with anybody involved in building websites for a living. So I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the sixteen tutorials which touch upon these topics. In this list you’ll find tutorials introducing testing, debugging, advanced object-oriented features, code profiling, security, enforcing coding standards, and more.

His list of articles includes:

• 10 Productive PHP Tools for Testing and Debugging
• Three Advanced Object-Oriented PHP Features You Need to Know
• Four Sane Solutions for PHP Debugging
• Enforcing Coding Standards with PHP_CodeSniffer
• Use PHPUnit to Implement Unit Testing in Your PHP Development

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a list of ten tools that can help you increase your productivity in your PHP development including ones for testing, automation and debugging.

Frustration can quickly set in when you are dealing with menial and often repetitive tasks such as manual code testing and deployment, yet you strive to become a more efficient programmer by staying DRY. So why not extend that quest to other parts of the application lifecycle, streamlining and automating such tasks? In this article I'll introduce you to ten PHP development tools that will help you do exactly that, leaving you with more time to concentrate on building great websites.

His list of ten tools consists of:

• PHPUnit
• Phing
• Github
• FirePHP
• XDebug
• PEAR
• PHP_CodeSniffer
• phpDocumentor
• PHP_Beautifier
• phpUnderControl

In a new post to the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has taken a look at the productivity that PHP allows developers (from a development perspective) and a case that he's come across that proves his point.

At the [Sogeti's Engineering World conference] there was a coding contest. Contestants could team up and had to write an application that found the shortest route through an arbitrary maze. [...] It wasn't until the second to last session during the conference that Juliette, Erik, Ian and Felix decided to not go see a talk but to attempt the contest.

The solution was presented to a largely non-PHP audience and benchmarked against some of the other entries created with other languages. The results were pretty amazing - while the PHP version didn't work through the problem the fastest, it did have a much shorter development time and lines of code.

On the IBM developerWorks site, there's part one of a new series that combines the latest version of the Zend Framework with the power of Google applications to create a custom web application.

In this three-part "Create a productivity package with the Zend Framework V1.5 and Google applications" tutorial series, we will build an application with Zend Framework V1.5 that uses the Google applications. Here in Part 1, we explore the various features of the Zend Framework, outlining the many new features in V1.5 that we will take advantage of to build an example Web site.

This first part introduces the Framework briefly and helps you create some simple controllers and views. They use the Zend_Layout to help with the output and show how to implement view helpers to make components for the pages. There's no connections to Google in this initial part - that'll come later on.

You'll need to register/login to get to it.