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).

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.

Ben Ramsey has posted his own wrapup of the first day of the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and some of his thoughts on the keynote talk given by Andi, Zeev, et al.

The first day of the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (the day of tutorials) was great. I sat in on Robert Richards's Advanced XML and Web Services and Marcus's and Sara's Extending PHP tutorials. I multi-tasked as best I could, catching up on some work while finishing my slides and listening to the presentations.

He comments on the talks he's attended (like Robert Richards' XML/Web services talk and the contents of the keynote - including the announcements of the collaborations with Microsoft, IBM, and the new advancements that Zend has made with their products.

In response to Ben Ramsey's earlier post about what PHP developers are work, Scott Johnson has posted some of his opinions on the matter.

Included in his thoughts are things like:

• "We're worth just as much as Java Programmers - but we get no respect - and we'll never get it"
• "You get what you pay for and, a little bit, clients are starting to understand this."
• "The difference between great PHP programmers and people who say they can do PHP is vastly more dramatic than you'd expect."

He agrees with Ben on just about everything, throwing in a comment there at the end about doing things for free:

Never, ever do anything for free*. I'd rather be paid $100 for $1,000 of work then take "options" or "stock" in lieu of cash. Clients never value what they get for free so you always have to charge them something. The "something" might not be large but it needs to be something. (ammended with an exception for charitable organizations/good causes)

In an effort to create a higher level of discussion on PHP than just the "why is this erroring?" or "how do I get PHP to..." questions, Davey Shafik has started a new channel over on the Freenode IRC network to futher talks about PHP and not just fixing other peoples errors.

Now, I really love helping people, but it's nice to get something back once in a while. So, I've decided to start a spin-off channel, one that does promote the things I want to talk about - and hopefully others do to. Join #php.thinktank on irc.freenode.net and lets talk about things.

The goal of the channel is to foster talks about topics such as design patterns, emerging PHP concepts, working on the bleeding edge, and new ways of doing old things. The channel is already set up and running smooth with users constantly around (though they might be just lurking), so come on over and join in.

Related to his work on the Services_Trackback PEAR Package he worked on, Tobias Schlitt looks today in this new blog post at some of his more recent thoughts on trackback spam.

It's been a long while since I worked on my PEAR package Services_Trackback, mainly because I was much too busy with work and university. Nevertheless I made up my mind about how to solve the problem of the so-called trackback spam.

Taking for granted, that the idea should work, there are 2 main questions to answer: "How can a sender of a trackback be identified?" and "If and how must the trackback standard be changed to support the identification?" For question #1 there is a simple answer (IMHO): PGP/GPG (further on referred to as GPG, for simplicity).

He suggests that since there is already a "trust relationship" inherent in the system, a PGP/GPG setup might be the most flexible, easy-to-use, constantly adapting method for preventing one of the banes of bloggers' existences...

With so many talking about fluent interfaces today, Andi Gutmans has tossed his hat into the ring with this new blog post with some of his thoughts.

I'd like to add to Paul's and Mike's posts regarding fluent interfaces.

I very much agree with them that this kind of method chaining allows to create very readable and intuitive interfaces. The million dollar question is when to actually use this kind of programming style.

Of course there are no definitive answers but I suggest to consider the following points: Use your intuition, If you don't have all of the data - reconsider using them, It really has to read well in your language (e.g. English), preferably as a complete sentence, and make sure that the base error handling it forces you to use is enough for your purposes.

And, of course, he's open to suggestions/comments on the subject, as well as any proposals for guidelines that might need to be set out there...

On his blog, John Cox has a few opinions of his own pertaining to the Zend Framework and this Loud Thinking post.

I have stayed away from commenting on the Zend Framework, as I may or may not have some use for it via Xaraya in the background. There's plenty of room for more frameworks, as each that is out there now has advantages and disadvantages. However, I couldn't resist pointing out this remark from Loud Thinking as it does cut through some of the propaganda of "extreme ease".

Interesting thoughts on the design process, which I hope won't fall on deaf ears.

He quotes a bit from the Loud Thinking post, highlighting some of the comments made about the Zend development process and how it might be headed down a less-productive path focusing on use cases and sample apps...