The NETTUTS website has posted a top ten list of things from the PHP masters out there, a few words of wisdom to live by. Here's the list along with the authors of each:

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.

Take a hint from Maarten Manders when renaming and moving around your unit testing order:

It's absolutely amazing how much you can mess up unit tests just by changing their order! (Trevi_* comes after Tilllate_*) Everyone knows that tests are supposed to be independent. But we all know how it is.

He asks for recommendations on what to do to help the situation. Comments on the post (including ones from Lukas Smith and Sebastian Bergmann) mention using PHPT, a new version of PHPUnit that will do just what he wants and whether or not to use Singletons.

According to I-nfotech, there's ten projects that every PHP developer out there just can't live without:

As a php web developer, you should know that php is probably the language that has the biggest code repository. So no matter what module you want to include in your project there should be an open source solution. [...] Anyway, after many years as a web developer, I've compiled a list of php classes that can be easily integrated in any project and I am regularly use.

He has it broken up into the ten different categories including "sending emails", "user manipulation", "fetching RSS feeds" and "grabbing remote content". Some of his choices are things native to PHP (like the mail function) but others are external classes like the Magpie RSS package.

On his blog, Oscar Merida has a quick new post those just starting out with sessions should take a look at. He gives four quick tips of things to watch out for that can help your development process go smoother.

PHP's support for sessions make adding "state" to your web application super easy. Bus because the illusion of state is maintained by storing a Session ID via a user's cookies, you might find yourself losing potentially productive hours chasing down bizarre client side bugs or opening up a potential security hole. Here are 4 tips to help you avoid wasting your time and securing your site.

Items on the list are:

• Don't use underscores in host names
• Commit your sessions before redirects
• Prevent session fixation (great security tip!)
• Don't expose session_id's

Tobias Schlitt shares some of his toughts on one of his latest in a list of books to read - Exporing PHP.

Although I did not read it, yet, I'd like to recommend it to you, since I think to know the authors good enough to believe they write good books.

In short, "Exploring PHP" is a roundup about advanced PHP programming experiences, covering different topics like: Event driven programming in PHP, Generation of 3D graphics, Refactoring and Migration, PHP6.

From the little that he's looked into the book, he can already tell it's a good resource and is recommending it based on that and the authors it comes from.