On 7PHP.com today another community interview has been posted - this time it's with Michael Wallner, a full-time PHP core developer working at SmugMug.

Today I bring you an interview with someone (named Michael Wallner, @_m6w6) who has been hired to work full-time on PHP. Yes you heard it right: this guy is paid to work on The Core of PHP. As you know PHP is open-source, so why would a company hire someone to work full-time on such a free technology? (I let you get the answers from Mike himself). Besides since he is highly involved with PHP and it’s core, it’s a good opportunity to learn from his experience and know-how, so let’s hear from him!

He answers questions about his past, how he started with PHP and what he thinks of the language now versus when he started out with it. He gives some advice to budding PHP developers and some of the libraries/projects he suggests. They then talk some about his work at SmugMug and how much time he'll be spending dedicated to working on the PHP core. There's also a bit answering the "why" question of why SmugMug would hire him to work on the core...but you'll have to read the interview to find out that answer.

Hasin Hayder has posted part one of a series he's doing on making an application similar to the popular FriendFeed site in PHP.

Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

Evan Sims, a recent convert from Flickr to SmugMug, has whipped up a little something to help make getting to those SmugMug unfriendly URLs a little bit easier - SmugUrl:

one aspect I didn't like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can't fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online...much more readable. He's even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.