On the ProDevTips blog, Henrik has written up an extensive tutorial with plenty of code examples on working with something inspired by a few other languages - fluent arrays and strings.

I've been working some with jQuery and Ruby lately, as you might know they both have very neat fluent interfaces for writing short and easily understandable code. Especially Ruby's array and string handling should be something that can be done in PHP so I started googling. [...] It's probably very possible that what I'm looking for is already part of some PHP framework or such but I didn't want to spend more time looking than being productive.

Based on some Ruby examples, he defines a set of functions that can be use to create these fluent interfaces to the common PHP variable types (contained in a class for easy use). The entire source can be downloded here.

Scott MacVicar shares a helpful hint for the PHP speakers out there - how to apply syntax highlighting to the code in your slides.

I use Apple's Keynote for doing my presentations and naturally these include some bits of code that need highlighting so that it’s easier to read. [...] In the end I used GESHI which is a highlight library written in PHP that supports the syntax highlighting of around 50 different programming and scripting languages.

He's provided his sample implementation to help you get up and running. You'll need to download and install GESHI to get it working though. Here's an example of the output.

On his blog today, Vinu Thomas spotlights one of the major up and comers in the PHP-based eCommerce software package offerings - Magento.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:

Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.

After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.

Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.