Brandon Savage has his own response to the "comments are harmful" post over on the PHP in Action blog:

There's a lot of good advice, especially about writing clean code. But the article fails to address a good number of really critical details and to some degree misses the point of Eli's article.

He mentions these points - the value of writing comments before hand, the usefulness of descriptive comments, how they can be used as a todo pointing to future development and using them to share the knowledge and let other people in on what you're thinking.

In a new post to his blog Keith Casey shares a few tips on naming conventions that can help increase readability in your code and make maintenance simpler in the future.

In my regular web wanderings recently, I found a great post entitled "The 7 Worst Verbs Programmers Use In Function Calls" and couldn't help but be reminded of a system that I worked on a few years ago. The core function of the system was named - no kidding - "doStuff". Everything in the application led towards that, used it, and then did other things as a result.

He suggests a structure he uses - "verbAjectiveNounStructure". Starting with an action, moving to a description of the action, to the target of the action and finally an optional structure - how the returned data is formatted.

The AnyExample.com tutorial site has a quick article for PHP/MySQL developers out there with 5 useful functions that can help you in your database development.

PHP usually comes with mysql extension mysql (mysql_... functions) which is rather low-level and requires writing too much code for a trivial tasks: error-checked execution of SQL queries, getting single row from SQL table, getting value from SQL table cell, etc. OOP mysqli extension isn't any better. In this article we present 5 useful functions which greatly simplify majority of real-life MySQL operations.

All of these helpful functions mentioned work with both PHP4 and PHP5, so no one's left out. They are:

• good_query
• good_query_list
• good_query_assoc
• good_query_value
• good_query_table

Stefan Esser is trying to clear up some confusion in a new post to the PHP Security Blog today about his stand on enabling open_basedir on your PHP installation.

From time to time I get the question why I recommend enabling open_basedir and on the other hand call it a solution flawed by design. This is actually a good question, because the untrained PHP user might get a little bit confused about this and might believe that I change my opinion on a daily basis.

He talks about his reasoning - how it does it's job protecting PHP developers from being able to get to those file, but how it's also flawed with issues due to some 3rd party libraries that have their own problems.

In his latest blog post, Sandro Groganz shares some of his finds for useful extensions for WordPress and the MediaWiki platforms.

His list consists of:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• WP-Leftycats
• GoogleMaps
• XFeed

In this new post Scott Johnson shares a PHP debugging tip that's "too useful not to blog".

Every so often you, in a fit of frustration, you whip out a little internal tool - perhaps a debugging hack - that all of a sudden just makes things much more clear and then you feel good and, for me, that means blogging it.

Now I'm not a fan of IDE's for php coding - but I will acknowledge freely that an IDE makes this kind of debugging much easier - so I whipped up get_caller_context, a debugging function, to support this.

The function he describes performs similar to a call to debug_print_backtrace but with a bit less output. He gives a simple example of what that output would be as well as a brief explaination as to what it means. And, of course, he also includes a link to the code.