In a new post to his blog Gaylord Aulke talks about some of the "soft facts" that make PHP different from Java:

Besides the usual aspects: scripting vs. compiled and in-process vs. seperate process and Multithreading etc., i think there are some "soft facts" that might be even more important for commercial software development.

He points out things like differences in object lifetimes, defined structures in applications and the "not invented here" syndrome that he thinks PHP suffers more from.

Anyway, the result is: Even though there are not so many standards in the PHP world, successful developers have a common understanding about the do's and don'ts in PHP. [...] PHP appears more predictable than other programming languages.

The Zend Developer Zone has published their latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions series (as recorded at last year's ZendCon) - Eric David's talk on project management and standards.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Eric David present "Project Management Methods to Maintain IT standards ".

You can either grab the mp3 to listen, use the in-page player or point your favorite aggregator at the feed for the series to get this and the other great episodes.

A new tutorial on DevShed today shows how to work with WordPress (a popular PHP-based blogging tool) to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of the site you have running it.

I ran into an issue on one of my own Wordpress sites the other day, so I decided to share with you my solution. What happened was I added an SEO modification to my site that finds all external links in my page and adds a rel="nofollow" attribute to them. However, I also like to target my external links to new windows, but the target attribute for the "a" tag has been depreciated and will not validate under XHTML strict.

His method of choice turned out to be a Javascript that would run through the links, looking for outbound ones, and dynamically add in the nofollow attribute when it finds one. Complete code is included ot show you how it's done.

On the PEAR blog today, they're asking for thoughts on some of the standards for the coming PEAR2 development environment:

Please read the following document and post your comments on the wiki using the discussion page. Comments are opened for a period of two weeks. It is very important that you comment as these standards will define PEAR2.

The standards can be found here and include everything from the base requirements and package approach down to specific package-related rules (for things like directory structure, class-to-file conventions and handling dependencies).

On the PHPKitchen site today, Demian Turner looks at a handy utility to ensure that the coding standards in your documents are all passable - PHP_CodeSniffer.

There was a fantastic CS helper package released at PEAR this week, PHP_CodeSniffer. The package, which requires PHP5 and is nicely coded, puts a phpcs script in your path so you can pass files or directories to it to get your CS validated.

The results are detailed and processing is surprisingly fast considering how many tokens are being parsed.

Demian gives an example of what the validation process looks like and why he finds the entire package particularly useful.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.

In a great new post from Alan Knowles he takes a look at code reviewing, specificaly in a PHP environment.

He breaks the post up into phases (one through four) with the steps outlined along the way (including the "oh sh*t, it's getting urgent, we better fix the delivered code and make it work well enough for the client to start testing" phase). Phase four is the largest, being the bug finding and fixing stage, some of the more intensive (and sometimes numbing) times of development.

He also includes a good, long list of some of the codeing standards he's accumulated over time, including:

• Not creating PHP includes with functions in them!
• Never hard code email subjects etc. in code, use templates.
• Not using libraries that where not specified.. or using non-PEAR libraries when PEAR ones are available...
• Everything extends the base class, even code run via cron jobs.

He also talks about using print rather than echo, exiting on XMLHttpRequest calls, shortcuts in Javascript, and cloning dataobject arrays over creating simple structs.

It's always good to finish a rather large project, and Robert Peake shares his joy in this new post on his blog nothing that not only is the project off and running, but it was all created based on a best practices/standards-based approach with respect to PHP development.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

He notes several of the things they used along the way, including:

• Design patterns
• Ajax
• Optimization
• Coding standards
• Extreme programming tactics

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory -- we did it.

Paul Jones has posted today about the release of the latest version of his Solar framework, version 0.20.0 alpha.

Exactly one month after the last release, I have uploaded version 0.20.0 alpha. There are lots of changes in this release, but the biggest news is that the page-controller now uses method-based actions (as opposed to file-based actions).

You can read the change notes here, but it's a really long list. If you want something a little more readable, with better narrative, you'll find it after the jump below. The new page-controller information is especially good. However, the narrative is quite long, so consider yourself warned. ;-)

For those that don't want to take the time to read through it all, he summarizes it into six different sections:

• Naming and Standards
• Class Name Changes
• Inherited Config File Values
• Adapter Configuration
• Locale Files
• Page-Controller Class

Each section has its own explaination of the changes made in (a bit) more concise manner. Be sure to check out the full notes to read up on everything.