On Reddit.com a reader has asked the community what they think he needs to do to progress his PHP skills past the "little bit" he's learned so far.

Last summer I started learning a little bit of PHP, knowing HTML and CSS drove me towards wanting to learn some PHP for fun. I went through a pretty simple book, and made some simple websites (registration and message system, user submitted data, file uploads) using mostly tutorials which I tweaked a little bit. Since last summer I haven't learned anything new, but now that summer is coming along again I might be a bit bored, so I have been thinking of attempting to learn even more.

Suggestions included in the comments are things like:

• Learn about software architecture.
• Understand your environment.
• I very highly suggest learning a PHP framework.
• http://www.phptherightway.com
• Start learning industry tools for PHP. It will all influence your coding style, and illustrate why some styles are considered best practices.
• To add to the other suggestions, I recommend becoming a regular contributor to one or more open source projects.
• What helped me a lot was to write my own micro framework using OOP that I can now use for future websites and web applications.
• Come up with a 'complex' web site/application idea and get to it. Bonus points if you can launch it and make money off it (half kidding).

You can read the full set of comments for more good suggestions here.

On Reddit.com there's an interesting discussion going on about what's considered to be 'advanced skills' for a PHP developer to have.

I'm going to throw out here some potential advanced skills from off the top of my head - not at all a complete list.... PHP objects? PHP regular expressions? Frameworks? Security measures? Ability to use PHP to do cool things like recursive node walking of XML files? Use of third party libraries? Or would you add something else entirely? Just curious, because I'm looking for work and want to know if I can reasonably bill myself as having advanced PHP skills. Thanks for the input!

Responses cover a wide range of topics including:

• the Zend Certification(s)
• Clean, easy to understand coding practices
• How to effectively test your applications
• Addressing security concerns

In this new post to her site, Lorna Mitchell shares some other skills/technologies that are "allied to PHP" and can make you a more effective (and better) developer for knowing them.

In web development, our biggest challenges are not writing code, we can do that. But getting the code safely from one place to another, with many people's work preserved, having our platform(s) correctly configured and understanding how to use them, making use of the tools in the ecosystem which will help us improve the quality of our code; these are the big challenges we face, and that's why I proposed this workshop and why I think all these topics are important.

Among the things she'll be talking about are useful things to know like effective use of version control, using a static analysis tool to evaluate your code and performance profiling. If you'd like to attend the talk and hear it all first-hand, you can find out more about PHPNW 2012 from their site.

In this recent post to the "Programmers" area of the StackExchange site, the user asks the community for help in testing a PHP developer during the interview process to asses their level of knowledge accurately.

My company needs to hire a PHP developer, but nobody has PHP knowledge in my company and we find difficult to test for PHP skills. If it were a C/Java developer I would ask him to write a quick implementation of the Game of Life, but PHP is a completely different language. I saw this test with interest. Anyone else has more suggestions?

There's several other suggestions made touching on a wide range of evaluations including:

• Security concerns (like SQL injection)
• Debugging/Profiling
• Framework experience
• Good overall development skills
• And inks to other similar questions

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article with six things that they (well, Daniela Baker) thinks every independent PHP developer should know and have in their arsenal.

PHP development is hot right now, but there are also lots of people in PHP development. If you want to make it as an independent PHP developer you’ve got to know more than just PHP. Here are six other essential skills you need to succeed as a PHP developer.

Her list of six is made up of:

• JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
• Knowing What You Don’t Know
• Business Communication
• Business Finance
• Project Management
• Networking

Really, independent or not, these types of skills/knowledge can help any developer out there to see the bigger picture outside of just their code, out to what the business is doing.

On IT World there's an interesting article about the programming skills that seem to be lost in today's coders and how what they may not know might hurt them in the end.

Some of these skills aren't likely to be needed again, any more than most of us need to know how to ride a horse or (sigh) drive a manual-transmission vehicle. But other skills and "lessons learned" may still or again prove relevant, whether developers are banging their heads against legacy systems, coding for new mobile and embedded devices... or other devices and applications we haven't yet thought of. [...] Here's what some industry veterans and seasoned coders think the younger generation doesn't know ... but should.

He's broken it up into a few different sections - one dealing with the lack of general hardware knowledge by a good section of the today's developers, another noting that programming is not the same as software engineering (yes, really). He also touches on the lacking idea of "thinking before coding" and how planning for errors has become less and less of an importance.

Cal Evans has posted a wrapup of the "Day Camp 4 Developers" event that happened this past Saturday. The event was targeted less towards the hard tech topics and more towards the "softer side" of things like working on resumes and furthering your career.

Well, it’s done. Our first ever Day Camp 4 Developers was yesterday and was by most accounts, a rousing success. Some of the comments over at Joind.In are just wonderful. I won’t rehash all the great times and comments but I do want to list a few things I learned, even if only for myself.

Some of the things he pulled from the sessions included:

• Don’t write software, use the tools available
• Long breaks are bad
• People will forgive a LOT if the content is good
• Face-to-face still trumps cyberspace

Company	Syneron
Location	Irvine, CA
Title	Webmaster with PHP Skills
Summary	Do you live near Irvine, CA? Are you really good at HTML/CSS/Javascript and know some PHP as well? Syneron is looking to hire a webmaster to maintain the corporate web site and probably work on some other projects. If you’re interested, send your resume to chartjes @ [the company's domain]
Link	More Information

Company	Syneron
Location	Irvine, CA
Title	Webmaster with PHP Skills
Summary	Do you live near Irvine, CA? Are you really good at HTML/CSS/Javascript and know some PHP as well? Syneron is looking to hire a webmaster to maintain the corporate web site and probably work on some other projects. If you’re interested, send your resume to chartjes @ [the company's domain]
Link	More Information

From the ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendorfer has shared some of his experience to help those CakePHP users out there that are looking at doing more templating to their applications than just the normal index changes.

One of the things I don't see getting to much coverage is how to create good templates when working with CakePHP. Since those are written in plain PHP, this does not apply to CakePHP only. So I'm sure many people have already developed their own style that they are comfortable with and I don't ask for them to change it. However, maybe some people new to the framework / language can benifit by taking a look at the one I'm using.

He covers a few different topics:

PHP tags
• Conditions
• Loops
• the linebreak issue
• avoiding multi-line statements
• Creating Zebra striped table rows

The code included on some of the points (not the multi-line or the PHP tags items) is simple and is summed up in less than six lines.