The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode co-hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler - "Episode 12: Irish Eyes Are Always Smiling".

Through a haze of jägerbombs and extreme fatigue, we were able to shovel out another pile of podcast for your listening enjoyment. Chris says it's episode 11 when it's actually episode 12, but hey!

They talk about the Apple vs. Android functionality gap, Rackspace's recent issues and the definition of "guiding principles in an open source project". They also mention another PHP community member Brian Deshong who has volunteered to help out with an iPad app for the show.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed (or on iTunes).

On the CloudSpring site today there's the continuation of a previous article about RackSpace's CloudFiles API. In this new post they show how to use their PHP SDK to connect to and use the CloudFiles service.

Rackspace provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for multiple programming languages. They store their PHP SDK on GitHub. The PHP SDK requires PHP 5 with the following modules: cURL, FileInfo and mbstring. In this tutorial we are going to review use of the PHP SDK with CloudFiles. Not all parts of the API will be covered but you will get a great start.

Code is included showing how to make the connection, work with containers, pushing content out to a CDN, object handling and a few other handy tips (and API info) to help you along your way.

Vid Luther has a recent post over on his blog today about using Phing to deploy WordPress to the cloud, more specifically to the Rackspace Cloud Sites.

My last post about Wordpress and Capistrano made people ask why wasn't I using Phing, and staying within the PHP ecosystem. The answer was simple, I wanted to learn Ruby, and I wanted to learn Capistrano. The question kept nagging me though, so I decided to find out how easy would it be to duplicate this in PHP.

He lists some of his requirements (as laid out in his Capistrano build) like made over a secure connection and can work with the Rackspace Cloud Sites. He came up against a few issues - some dealing with the platform, another about the tools installed - but besides that, things got working quickly. He includes the XML configuration file he used for Phing to get it all working happily.

Hasin Hayber has posted about a new library he and his group have created to interface directly with the RackSpace Cloud Server API - phprackcloud.

So we have spend our time for last two days and developed a PHP client library to use RackSpace cloud server API from inside a PHP application. [...] There is plenty of documentation and example included. The code is mostly self explanatory. Please don't forget to check the Wiki page to get some idea on how to use this library and how far you can go. We have covered all available methods by RackSpace cloud server in our client library.

Davey Shafik also added a comment to the post about an interface of his own that uses parts of the Zend Framework to make and handle the request.