Lukas Smith has written up the FAQ for the emPHPower movement and has posted about them on his blog:

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The FAQ includes answers to lots of questions including:

• How to I get involved?
• What is the target audience?
• Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?
• What is the purpose of the membership fees?
• Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?
• Who decides on what emPHPower does?

Blake has posted some of his opinions on "best practices" that can help you land that new job you've been looking for:

The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. [...] Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head programmer on a conference call, and they ended up sending me a technical assessment quiz.

In the quiz, there was one question the prompted him to come up with his tips - ten things that you can do to keep your code clean, lean and easy to maintain. His tips include things like "use single-quotes around array indexes", "don't use open short tags" and "document your code". Some of the suggestions don't make that much of a difference, but others (like the documentation one) can make the world of difference down the line.

This post from Hasin Hayder has been getting a lot of attention lately as well as both positive and negative feedback (check out the comments) on the "I don't give you a damn, if..." method of interviewing.

From Hasin Hayder's original post:

The reason behind writing this blog post is I've interviewed some candidates recently and They dont know the name of the developers of PHP, MySQL or almost any other libraries they make their living on. They dont even know the history of these tools.

Both Vidyut Luther and Chris Shiflett have posted their opinions on the approach, both supporting his ideas noting that good PHP developers are passionate about what they do. That passion usually shows itself in learning as much as they can about the language, both knee deep in code and in finding out about the community around it.

Christopher Kunz thinks a bit differently, however:

I have to ask myself: What are you guys taking? Are you seriously discussing any kind of name-dropping as an interview subject? It's not only irrelevant who created a programming language, it's even a hindrance for interviewers since all that small-talk bullshit takes precious time off the actual knowledge assessment.

Since the first stable version of the Zend Framework has been out for a while now (version 1.0), the Zend Developer Zone is starting up their own way to give back to the project - the The Big Q&A session about all things Zend Framework:

On April 30, 2008, Zend's very own Zend Framework team will make themselves available for a 2-hour Q&A session. You can submit your questions in advance here to give us an opportunity to think them over a bit, or you can surprise us with them during the webinar.

The webinar will be happening On April 30th at 9am PDT and will last about two hours, during which any and all (hopefully) questions about the framework will be answered.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has also posted about it over on his blog.

The odinjobs website recently interviewed several PHPers in the community about their perspectives on PHP as a language and some of the resources they recommend. Among those on the list are Jeff Moore, Vidyut Luther, Matthew Turland and Richard Heyes.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), was introduced in 1998 by Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski and Rasmus Lerdorf (the original PHP/FI creator). In less than 10 years, there are over 20 million internet domains hosted on servers with PHP installed (source: Wiki). We will talk to our PHP experts to see why they think PHP rocks

Here's the questions they asked:

• If you were to start afresh, would you learn PHP again?
• What do you think is the most important feature of the PHP language?
• What PHP forums would you recommend?
• What book would you recommend to a newbie?
• Name a programming language that you would like to learn? (if you had the time & resources, of course)

Check out the full article for their answers to these questions.

Stoyan Stefanov has posted a few suggestions that you should probably ask your host-to-be before taking the plunge, making the commitment and entrusting your life to them (well, at least your data).

know choosing a hosting company is not easy, mainly because of all affiliate sites that publish fake reviews selling the host. Just like most other things, it's pretty hard to find unbiased reviews. So here's a list of questions to ask your future host-to-be, hopefully if they say YES to all, they have a pretty good shot at being decent.

While he admits that there are non-technical questions that should be asked too, he offers up some of his suggested technical ones to help weed things out quickly. Several are more general types (cron jobs, parking domains) but others are more PHP-related (using php_value, changing php.inis). Check out the post for more suggestions.

In a response of sorts to these interview questions posted by Nick Halstead, Matt Wilkin took the next step and worked up the answers for the questions in a new two-part series.

Well at another blog they shared some pre-interview questions from Yahoo for a PHP job. The only problem is they never provided the answers. So that's what I'm going to do now.

Part one answers questions one through eleven and the second part wraps things up with the answers for questions twelve through twenty-two.

The PEAR Blog has posted a request for ideas to help work up a new developer FAQ they can hand out to potential PEAR developers as a "jumpstart" guide to working with the package repository.

New developers need quite a time to familiarize themselves with the rules and conventions in PEAR. With the new role of mentors in PEAR2, they will have a contact person they can ask in that cases. But in many cases the same questions will get asked which will get boring for the mentoring developer, so we need a Mini-FAQ with a list of things the newbie should know.

They're looking for comments posted to the entry to help define this guide. So far, a suggested outline has been proposed by David Coallier for both general information and developer-specific details.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from the latest poll (they conducted over the past week) that asked which of the options given was your favorite framework choice.

Options included CodeIgniter, CakePHP, PHP on TRAX, Propel, Seagull, Solar, the Zend Framework and more. Coming in with the largest percentage of the votes, though was CakePHP with 56.1 percent of the responses. Coming in second (but a ways behind) was CodeIgniter followed by the Zend Framework.

If you didn't get a chance to get your vote in on that poll, you can get in on this week's poll and voice your opinion. This time, they're asking which (of the given options) should a programmer give the more emphasis to when developing their application.

The International PHP Magazine has posted their results from the poll they've conducted over this last week. This time they asked the question "Which is your Favorite CMS written in PHP?"

Options for the poll included Drupal, the Dragonfly CMS, CMS Made Simple and, the winner by a large margin - Joomla. It came in with 52.3 percent of the votes, followed by Drupal with only 14 percent.

If you didn't get your vote in for this past week's poll, they've just started up another, asking which of the options is the best for fetching data from a MySQL database - good_query, good_query_list, good_query_assoc, good_query_value, good_query_table. Cast your vote today!