php|architect has announced another podcast series leading up to this year's TEK-X conference happening in May.

Last year php|architect and Microsoft got together and hosted a series of webcasts on topics of interest to PHP developers. We had so much fun that we are going to do it again this year. As most of you know, we had so many great proposals submitted to TEK·X that there was no way we could schedule them all. This year, instead of saying "Sorry, better luck next year" to these presenters, we selected the best of the ones that we couldn't find room for and invited them to be a part of the webcast series.

You can see the full list of the webcasts on this page. This round includes topics like Doctrine, Drupal, caching on WordPress and Windows Azure. You'll need to register to attend, but there's no charge for the registration. The first one starts next week - Friday, March 5th with Jonathan Wage covering Doctrine 2.

In case you missed the whole series of posts that Matthew Turland did on the Magento e-Commerce platform, he's summed them all up in a new post to the Blue Parabola blog.

The new kid on the PHP e-commerce block, Magento, has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. Earlier this year, I was entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. What you see here is the result. Comments are welcome, thanks in advance for your contribution.

Topics in the series covered the catalog browsing, customer service, shipping and SEO features the popular software has to offer.

Giorgio Sironi has been busy posting a whole series of articles looking at testing PHP applications, some with Zend Framework and others just look at testing in general. Here's a list of the current articles:

• Testing and Constructors
• Unit testing and programming paradigms
• How not to test controllers
• Answering some questions on controller testing
• Mocking and template methods

The IBuildings techPortal has posted the latest episode of their Dutch PHP Conference series of podcasts (as recorded at the DPC 2009 event). This new episode is Derick Rethans giving a talk on PHP and D-BUS.

The D-BUS Inter Process Communication mechanism is the basis for many system-related functionality on Linux-based systems. Both GNOME, KDE, as well as the Open Moko Linux computing platform use it extensively for everything related to talking to services and hardware. Skype, as well as other applications, provide D-BUS APIs as well.

His talk gets into the details of the PHP/D-BUS integration by creating a simple script to control a Skype instance and a PHP-GTK tool to talk to an OpenMoko application.

You can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Gilang Chandrasa has started up a new series of tutorials about the CodeIgniter framework, starting with a bit of introductory material.

I am writing a small CodeIgniter tutorial compilation, it's not finished yet. Really like to have more feedbacks. Tweet me at http://twitter.com/komunitasweb Thank you for your feedback.

There's only three parts in the series right now - why to pick CodeIgniter, the basics of the MVC framework and some of the initial steps to getting started with the framework.

Giorgio Sironi has just wrapped up his posts in a series on practical testing of PHP applications with PHPUnit in nine parts:

What is unit testing and why a php programmer should adopt it? It may seem simple, but testing is the only way to ensure your work is completed and you will not called in the middle of the night by a client whose website is going nuts. [...] Unit testing is the process of writing tests which exercise the basic functionality of the smallest cohesive unit in php: a class.

Here's a list of the topics covered in the series:

• part 1: PHPUnit usage
• part 2: write clever tests
• part 3: assertions
• part 4: fixtures
• part 5: annotations
• part 6: refactoring and patterns
• part 7: stubs
• part 8: mocks
• part 9: command line options

Mark van der Velden has posted the third part of his "PHP Quiz" series to test your mental muscles on various PHP-related questions.

Welcome to another part of the PHP Quiz series, again some interesting questions to crack your brain about. If you have some nice additions or questions, be sure to leave a comment. Enjoy part three!

Questions in this edition cover unset, form output, working with strings, references, globals and working with class inheritance. You can check out part one and part two for more brain teasing fun.

If you missed Cal Evans' webinar (as a part of the php|architect series leading up to CodeWorks 2009) you're in luck! He's posted some of the parts of his presentation on his blog.

Zend Framework is unique in the PHP framework lineup in that it is simple to pull out single pieces and use them independently of the framework itself. This was the premise of the webcast I presented as part of the summer webcast series, hosted by phparchitect and sponsored by Microsoft. It it, I take several pieces of Zend Framework and use them to build a simple little tool. The tools is highly incomplete and only meant to demonstrate technique.

He's posted this sample code and his slides for the presentation for your perusal. The recording of the webcast isn't up yet, but you can check out other webcasts in the series on the Webcasts page on the php|architect site.

Matthew Turland has posted the fourth part of his series looking at the Magento eCommerce application and some of its features.

This post is the fourth part of a series covering the feature set of the Magento PHP-based e-commerce package. In particular, it will review the catalog management features.

He covers:

• Private sales
• Inventory Management
• Batch import/exports of the catalog
• Batch product updates
• Google Base integration
• Bundled/Group/Virtual products
• Downloadable/digital products

...and much more. Check out the full post for more information and a summary of each feature.

If you have the time later today and want to listen in on some great PHP content, be sure to check out today's webcast from php|architect (as a part of the series leading up to CodeWorks 2009) on PHP and Windows integration from Sumit Chawla.

Using some of the technologies proposed by Microsoft to extend your PHP applications doesn't require a rip & replace approach. Sumit will present a series of projects (samples toolkits, frameworks and SDK) that enable PHP developers to easily extent their web applications.

Sumit will talk about technologies like Silverlight, SQL Server and Windows Azure. You can sign up for the webcast here (currently only Windows and OS X are supported by the GoToMeeting software).

If you'd like more information on the other webcasts in the series, you can see the full list here.