Cal Evans, a prominent member of the PHP community, has put together a new project sharing what he's called "Wisdom of the ElePHPant", a series of short thoughts by members of the PHP community touching on everything from the art of programming to helping out open source projects to working with code reviews.

All of these little nuggets of wisdom have been gathered and put into a small book, one per page. These books cannot be purchased but there are sources where you can find them and get a copy of your own (such as conferences, user groups or from various members of the PHP community). Fortunately, there was more than enough wisdom to go around and some of the submissions are also being shared on the site including current ones from Jeremy Kendall, Erika Heidi and Cal himself.

This is a great resource for some quick chunks of wisdom from developers who have seen (and overcome) a lot of the challenges developers experience every day. I highly suggest picking up a copy for yourself...if you can track one down. For more check out the project's main site, WisdomOfTheElePHPant.com.

In his latest post, Stuart Herbert has shared some thoughts about the recently proposed PSR-3 proposal for a unified logging interface for PHP projects.

PSR-3 is a proposed standard (voting has finished, it should appear as an accepted standard when the PSR folks recover from too much Christmas turkey) describing a common logging interface for PHP frameworks. It’s based on a small subsection of RFC 5424, which describes the Syslog standard, which is a very sensible choice. Sysadmins think in terms of Syslog levels, and they utterly hate dealing with loggers that don’t map cleanly onto Syslog.

He briefly introduces the PSR and the format of the logger with some of the main methods it should implement and what they do. He talk gets into some of his critiques about the proposal, namely the method naming, the exception handling parameter and the proposed LogLevel constants.

Stuart Herbert, in looking around for an IDE to work with, has given NetBeans a shot and has posted some of his thoughts on the software and how well it fits with this his development.

When it comes to IDEs for working on PHP projects, I’ve been a relatively happy user of phpEclipse for several years. (Tried Zend Studio, but never managed to convince Zeev about how much it sucks). But when the guys in the office started switching over to Netbeans, I thought it would be interesting to take a look for myself.

He lists some of the positives including its good performance, code completion, code refactoring and some of the weaker points like the fact that it's a memory hog, it doesn't fit in with the OS X interface style, there's too many dialog boxes, etc. Overall, he likes it and found it pretty solid but may not make the switch just yet.

Following up from a previous post of his that got lots of great feedback, Joshua Eichorn has posted his own thanks, not only for the responses to his own thoughts but to the PEAR community as a whole.

You'll be happy to know that were already working on many of your suggestions, Greg's post on the subject has some more details. I'll be sharing everyones comments with the rest of the PEAR group at our meeting on the 13th, so if anyone has a suggestion they haven't submitted yet thats your deadline.

The thing he's most excited about is the new mentoring program that will introduce new developers to the PEAR-ality of it all and get them involved with both the coding and the community.

Following up from a previous post of his that got lots of great feedback, Joshua Eichorn has posted his own thanks, not only for the responses to his own thoughts but to the PEAR community as a whole.

You'll be happy to know that were already working on many of your suggestions, Greg's post on the subject has some more details. I'll be sharing everyones comments with the rest of the PEAR group at our meeting on the 13th, so if anyone has a suggestion they haven't submitted yet thats your deadline.

The thing he's most excited about is the new mentoring program that will introduce new developers to the PEAR-ality of it all and get them involved with both the coding and the community.

On his blog today, Ryan Malesevich has posted two items about his recent experiences with the latest version of WordPress (2.1).

One of the reasons was I wanted to upgrade Wordpress to 2.1 and I knew that it could take a while. I wanted to make sure there were no problems with plugins etc. But I’ve upgraded, and I would say that I haven’t run into any troubles. Everything appears to work as it should.

He follows this up with some initial impressions of the new version, including the image upload system and the auto-save functionality (to ensure the least amount of data loss, just in case).

On his blog today, Ryan Malesevich has posted two items about his recent experiences with the latest version of WordPress (2.1).

One of the reasons was I wanted to upgrade Wordpress to 2.1 and I knew that it could take a while. I wanted to make sure there were no problems with plugins etc. But I’ve upgraded, and I would say that I haven’t run into any troubles. Everything appears to work as it should.

He follows this up with some initial impressions of the new version, including the image upload system and the auto-save functionality (to ensure the least amount of data loss, just in case).

In this new entry on the APress "Inside Open Source" blog, Matt Wade shares some of his thoughts on one of the more popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework.

I've found that using the framework has significantly decreased my development time and really just given me cleaner, easier to maintain code. Of course, these are the goals of any framework. I do have a couple of issues I've come across and it is those I'd like to talk about.

The two issues he mentions were problems with the Zend_Db component (not everyone has just one primary key in their table) and caching problems with Zend_Cache (no unique lifetimes included).

In this new entry on the APress "Inside Open Source" blog, Matt Wade shares some of his thoughts on one of the more popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework.

I've found that using the framework has significantly decreased my development time and really just given me cleaner, easier to maintain code. Of course, these are the goals of any framework. I do have a couple of issues I've come across and it is those I'd like to talk about.

The two issues he mentions were problems with the Zend_Db component (not everyone has just one primary key in their table) and caching problems with Zend_Cache (no unique lifetimes included).

Christopher Kunz wonders in this new post about the filter extension that's been getting so much press in the PHP community lately - specifically about it being active despite not being finished.

Basically, what he [Ben Ramsey] conveyed to me (and his blog entry supports this) was not to use ext/filter or Zend_Filter at all. Nearly every second slide regarding functions of the ZF component or the extension contained remarks like "This doesn't work yet, it's a TODO", "this won't validate XY properly".

Of course, other community members (Pierre-Alain Joye and Ilia Alshanetsky) come back in the comments to refute Christopher's claims. They note that it's not the filter extension that has the problems, rather that some of the features are missing outside of the core filtering functionality.