On the CodeForALiving.io site (from StackOverflow) there's an interview with Mohamed Said, the first official employee for Laravel (and its related ecosystem).

Mohamed Said got his first computer at age 13—they were just becoming commonly accessible in Egypt—and started learning to code almost immediately. Flash was what drew him in, he says, with its animations and color and, well, “flashy” stuff.

[...] Last month, Mohamed Said became the first full-time hire at Laravel, an open source PHP framework built by Taylor Otwell. Otwell built the framework as a side project, and when it took off, quit his job to work on it full time. Just a few months ago, he decided he needed help maintaining the project and posted his first full-time job opening, and Said was an obvious choice.

The interview gets into some of Mohamed's background as a developer and his own personal experiences with the Laravel framework. The article then moves on to some of his work in open source software and how he grew into the Laravel community overall. He talks some about roadblocks he came up against along the way but encourages people to contribute, mentioning both the growth it can provide and how to get started with your own contributions.

On The Nerdery's blog today there's a new post suggesting that most of the reports of WordPress' insecurity are wrong and they're going to set the record straight.

I have often heard the remark “WordPress is insecure!” My response is “Where did you hear that?” and “When did you hear that?” [...] WordPress core is, in fact, very secure, just as secure as any other Content Management System, just as secure as any other software suite or Operating System. Security issues most often arise from administrators and users. In other words, you are the weakest link.

They suggest that between the high-profile nature of WordPress and the constant (sometimes wrongful) warning being put out there about its security, people perpetuate the message sometimes unknowingly. Besides the human element being the largest risk, they also point out a few others including issues around shared hosting and the availability of easy-to-find tools to exploit flaws. They talk about a brief history of the WP core security and how they define the real security of a product - how quickly it responds to security issues. They also include a few suggestions for you to help harden your own WP installation.

On the PHP-Tip-a-Day site today there's an new "fable" posted in the Design Pattern Fables series. This time it's about the Observer pattern (and kings and princes).

The first place I recall encountering the observer pattern was not in PHP, but in JavaScript. If you've ever set a listener to fire when an event happened, you've used the observer pattern. Functions or methods are registered with an object so that when it experiences a specific event, it "notifies" the registered functions or methods by calling them.

His story tells about a royal family, a pregnancy and magic mirrors that allows for instant communication between the family and outlying locations. He relates it to the objects and "watchers" that make up the Observer pattern and gives a brief code example (in Javascript) of a HTML button and a jQuery event observer that fires when it's clicked.

Following his recent allegory about the Factory pattern (as described in story form) Greg Bulmash has posted the Legend of the Singleton to help with your understanding this pattern.

The Singleton pattern provides an interface to let your application always pull out the same object (or make a new one if it needs to).

His legend talks about kings, mythological data sources and the overloading of multiple "hoses" (connections) to it. Also included is a code example showing a simple database class that includes a "getInstance" method acting as the Singleton to return either a new or the (same) current instance.

If you're constantly hungering for more PHP news, there's a new resource (a Digg-like one, too) that wants to give PHPers the latest from the community and give them a way to show which they like the best - abcphp.

abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The site lets you vote (with a registered account) on the PHP-related articles they've posted ala Digg.com and breaks them up into categories like "New Releases", "PHP Dev Tools", "Database" and "Security". You can even create groups of people that share the same interests. Check it out and maybe submit a story while you're there.

On his blog today Sebastian Bergmann has posted about new functionality that's been added to the PHPUnit unit testing package for PHP - support for BDD and Stories.

PHPUnit_Extensions_Story_TestCase is a new extension for PHPUnit that has been contributed by Xait, a company that I visited last fall. It adds a story framework with a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

He includes an example of the new extension in action - creating a Story, adding Steps to it and the output that would result from the execution (reading?) of the example.

On his blog today Sebastian Bergmann has posted about new functionality that's been added to the PHPUnit unit testing package for PHP - support for BDD and Stories.

PHPUnit_Extensions_Story_TestCase is a new extension for PHPUnit that has been contributed by Xait, a company that I visited last fall. It adds a story framework with a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

He includes an example of the new extension in action - creating a Story, adding Steps to it and the output that would result from the execution (reading?) of the example.

In a new blog entry today, Hasin Hayder tells the reader a "little story" about a journey he made to get to framework happiness with CodeIgniter.

He walks through his thoughts and needs at different stages of the development process - a database abstraction library here, version control there - and ending up with the framework choice that faced him. Among his options were offerings by Prado, Seagull, Symfony, CakePHP and his pick - CodeIgniter.

Suddenly I got codeigniter and I was able to run a whole lot of controllers, templates and models in minutes (well not in minutes, but much less time than previous ones). A rich , pleasing to read, friendly set of documentation, a bunch of in built libraries and less autonomous control gives me full freedom over my application. It was easy to integrate my old friend smarty with it, in case it comes with it’s own active record, but it gives me chance to add adoDB with it. I fall in love with code igniter soon after i realize that it comes with almost zero learning time (or i better say learning on demand)

He also mentions that, had the post been a bit more technical in nature, other factors would have been included. As it is, though, it flows a bit better this way.

In a new blog entry today, Hasin Hayder tells the reader a "little story" about a journey he made to get to framework happiness with CodeIgniter.

He walks through his thoughts and needs at different stages of the development process - a database abstraction library here, version control there - and ending up with the framework choice that faced him. Among his options were offerings by Prado, Seagull, Symfony, CakePHP and his pick - CodeIgniter.

Suddenly I got codeigniter and I was able to run a whole lot of controllers, templates and models in minutes (well not in minutes, but much less time than previous ones). A rich , pleasing to read, friendly set of documentation, a bunch of in built libraries and less autonomous control gives me full freedom over my application. It was easy to integrate my old friend smarty with it, in case it comes with it’s own active record, but it gives me chance to add adoDB with it. I fall in love with code igniter soon after i realize that it comes with almost zero learning time (or i better say learning on demand)

He also mentions that, had the post been a bit more technical in nature, other factors would have been included. As it is, though, it flows a bit better this way.

David Sklar has a quick mention on his blog today about the article concerning Ning in the latest issue of PHP Magazine.

The new issue of International PHP Magazine is out, with the cover story I wrote on building Ning apps.

The article provides an overview of working in the Ning playground -- in addition to all the regular PHP you know and love, it covers using the Ning Content Store, simplifying file uploads, and using our Ajax components.

Ning is "the easiest way to create your own social web apps on the Internet today".