On Reddit.com there's a recent post answering a question asked about PHP and continuous integration during a project's development.

Does anyone have experience with PHP and Continuous Integration? If so, what tools and / or platforms did you use?

Suggestions in the comments include:

• Codeception for unit testing
• the Jenkins PHP template
• Atlassian Bamboo
• Jenkins
• Travis-CI (more for open source projects)

On the Monitor.us blog there's a recent guide to performance tuning your PHP with sections on lots of topics, some related directly to the code and others more towards the environment it lives in.

The World-Wide Web offers more PHP performance tips than can be comfortably discussed in one article, so the following is merely a list that can be used for reference purposes. The tips are divided into categories to group similar things together and make it easier to find what we need. The author's search for tips was extensive, but completeness still cannot be guaranteed.These tips fall into category #3.1 (the server executes a script) in the taxonomy of tips that we have been working with.Because of the sheer volume, these tips have not been tested. The reader is expected to test them in his own production environment before relying on them. This is not unreasonable, though, because the value of most tips depends on the unique environment within which PHP operates.

Sections in the guide include:

• Caching
• Session handling
• Compression
• Memory Leaks
• Code optimization
• Using services

Also included in the post are a list of links that were references for the tips in the list..

On his blog today Chris Jones has posted a long list of resources that the PHP developers using Oracle as a backend could find useful in their development.

He's broken them up into categories to help split things out a bit:

• Some overall links
• The OCI8 extension
• Databases like Oracle Express Edition, MySQL, Oracle Berkley DB
• the NetBeans IDE
• Oracle Linux and Tuxedo
• Oracle Instant Client

Several of the descriptions also come with their own "Install Now" links to help you get started using them quickly. There's lots of tutorial links peppered through out the post too.

Most of the bugs that get reported to the PHP project are pretty useful. They help developers track down those small, random issues that might slip through the cracks otherwise. There are, however, some of them that make you wonder a bit about the person that submitted them Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in a new blog post.

Recently the PHP project has been receiving an increasing number of rather silly reports, these vary from simply not reading the manual, searching the internet or a fundamental lack of understanding how the internet works.

He points out three in particular (from the same person, no less) about things that shown an almost complete lack of understand of what PHP does. One was a request to make PHP use less CPU and another asking to make PHP censorship free and, finally, a request to make PHP more secure...by doing away with support for cookies.

Scott also suggests a few constructive things you can do before submitting a good (useful) bug report:

• Gather together as much relevant information as you can (generalizations are bad)
• Run performance checks against older PHP versions to try to pin down when the bug was added
• And, finally: "don't get aggressive or be an asshole when your bug reports get closed".

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.

Patrick Reilly has posted about a new group that's being formed in the PHP world - a PHP Evangelism Team designed to help promote the language.

The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.

They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.

Rich McIver has provided a guide of sorts for companies out there to help "attract, retain and utilize rock star programmers" for their business:

There are plenty of programmers out there, but rock star programmers? They are few and far between. Learn how to locate these gems and keep them happy with the resources below.

The article is broken up into five different sections:

• Job Sites
• Locating Quality Programmers
• Screening
• Care and Feeding of Programmers
• Other Considerations

There's tons of links under each with some good advice not only for those doing the interview but also for the interviewee trying to land the job.

DevShed continues their look at standalone PHP scripts (server-side scripting, not on the web) in part two, "Managing Standalone Scripts in PHP" excerpted from the book "Advanced PHP Programming" from George Schlossnagle.

Last week, we began our discussion of PHP standalone scripts. This week, we'll be talking about child processes, shared resources, signals, and writing daemons.

They jump right in, going first for a look at forking off child processes from the script using the pcntl functionality you'll need to build into PHP. Resource management is key to working with server scripts, and they show you how to close them out when you're through. Next up is a brief look at the types of signals that you can send to the child processes, and some good rules to follow for writing daemons in PHP.

WebReference.com has a new sample chapter from Sara Goleman's book "Extending and Embedding PHP" (Chapter 3) taking a look at memory management in PHP.

One of the most jarring differences between a managed language like PHP, and an unmanaged language like C is control over memory pointers.

The chapter looks at:

• Freeing up unneeded resources
• Handling error requests correctly
• An introduction to the Zend Memory Manager
• Counting references to avoid unnecessary copying
• The usefulness of "copy on write"
• Saving resources with "change on write"
• Difficulties with handling seperation of values

Each of the above items is accompanied by a good bit of text and code examples where appropriate (even a diagram or two to make things clearer).

Adam Trachtenburg has linked two resources that PHP5 developers out there working with SOAP might find handy:

• Writing SOAP clients and servers with PHP5 - a presentation from Michael Rasmussen
• Webservice Helper - WSDL generator PHP 5 - just what it says, a library to help with the creation of web services with SOAP, including creating the WSDL file.

Neither of these were tested by Adam but they both definitely sound interesting (and both pretty up-to-date).