I downloaded the framework and started the Yii blog tutorial, but I’m finding that while the concepts are pretty straight forward, the tutorial leaves out some important details so you have to do a lot of back and forth with the demo code to see what is missing.

I will be back in a couple days to update the details of the project.

The Goal

• Finish a real world site every 60 days using a different PHP framework.
• Post an ongoing review of the framework being used.
• Have fun.

60 Days will launch January 1st 2009. See you then.

XAJAX replacement

If you are familiar with XAJAX you know it is an easy way to integrate PHP and AJAX, if you aren’t familiar with it you should go check it out. When I started writing my own framework, I chose to integrate it as a first class citizen. Recently I have been preparing to hang my framework out for others to play with and and realized that XAJAX just wasn’t fitting in anymore, a few of my concerns were:

• Not conceptually consistent with the rest of the framework.
• One of just two external dependencies (PHP), my goal being to eliminate all external PHP dependencies from the core of the framework.
• Not strict PHP 5, they still support PHP 4 with no plans to drop it.

Those were the main reasons for replacing XAJAX, another was that I really wanted to integrate the Javascript side with jQuery since it is the “supported” javascript library for the framework. None of the reasons I’m replacing XAJAX reflect on its capabilities it really does what it does very well. Anyways I estimated a week and have been at it for about 1 1/2 weeks a bit longer than I thought.

Vanilla

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a forum for PHP Bloggers to hang out on, I wanted something super simple ( to keep me from playing with it too much), and was pointed towards vanilla. It has a very clean interface and getting my template to work in it was fairly simple. Simplicity seems to be the overall theme so maybe it will keep me focused on just using it instead of playing with it!

Changing Jobs

I’m in the middle of changing jobs so no time to really do anything extra (fun) for probably another week. I haven’t had time to read anything at all so no Weekly Readers.

Everybody is expecting lots of traffic. Thats the trend of last weeks posts anyway, there were at least 7 articles on the subject. It is one of my favorite topics, unfortunately I never have enough traffic to see any of them actually solve a problem for me.

• .htaccess – gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving
• Dealing with Traffic – Part 1: Media files
• Caching PHP pages
• Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs
• Benchmarking Applications with PHP
• Save your Site, Cache that Data!
• Introduction to web caching

Patterns

Patterns is another topic I really wished I saw more PHP articles for. Somebody put this on dzone maybe it will start a trend for next week? Patterns for PHP.

Zend

The weekly Zend Framework related articles. I am going to have to give in and actually do something with the ZF before its at version 2.0. There is a tutorial series in the list that walks you through building a blog application, I think I will try to follow it.

• An Example Zend Framework Blog Application – Part 1: Introductory Planning
• An Example Zend Framework Blog Application – Part 2: The MVC Application Architecture
• Subversion for the Example Zend Framework Blog Tutorial Series
• Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine
  
• Translating Zend_Form error messages and more

Books and Reviews

• php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, 2nd Edition
• Drupal 6: The missing manual
• 6 books to master PHP
• Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5
• Programming PHP
• Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce

Miscellaneous Stuff

Every week I have a ton of links that don’t really fit in any particular category. I usually try to fit them all in somewhere, but the last couple weeks have been all over the place so here goes a big list of misc. stuff.

• Testable API’s
• SPL autoloading in PHP
• HTTP Status: 100 Continue
• HTTP Status: 201 Created vs. 202 Accepted
• Continuous Integration with phpUnderControl
• 5 PHP 5 features you can’t afford to ignore

Future articles

The last couple articles I’ve written in this series have been short changed and I apologize for that, I started the series for several reasons one was to discipline myself to write on a regular basis, they definitely have helped serve that purpose. I received an email today as i wrote this one telling me how useless they are. I’m not very thin skinned believe me it doesn’t offend me to not be found useful , maybe they are useful to others maybe they aren’t, I wrote them because they are fun to do. However on looking back I have to agree that this blog has become a one trick pony, so starting next week I will be writing more articles that actually have original work produced by me. I will continue with this series and am asking for comments on what would be useful for others in the Weekly Review.

Oh and I have a fan who will punch you in the nose if you don’t like what I write about, thats better than all the dzone votes in the world.

hurt to write this article

Respect

This seems to be a reoccurring theme lately — PHP and Respect. Its frustrating to read things that are not true written by people without real first hand knowledge and experience with the language. However, the reality is that good code is written by knowledgeable and skilled PHP developers and most impressively actually used on production sites the world over, To me you have earned respect when the code you write gets used by millions of users every day. Beautiful elegant solutions that never make it off of a development server and into the wild just don’t matter. Fortunately I am entertained by mine is better than yours posts like this Why Ruby is better than Symfony just because they often get so many things wrong, and the response Response to Andy Jeffries why ruby is better than symfony.

How to

There were a lot of code snippets and how-to do its in my feed reader this last week. They aren’t always the most authoritative or cutting edge examples but I am always surprised by the uses people can come up with for PHP and all the various web API’s out there that are underused, and every once in a while you find a gem.

• Charts with PHP and Google Charts API — I love charts.
• XMPPHP A Jabber class for PHP — This looks like a lot of fun, and the one I have the least time to get caught up in playing with .
• Google RageRank in PHP — I can’t think of anything I would use this for, but somebody somewhere is obsessing over their PR and needs this.
• Custom Digg Counter in WordPress with PHP — Digg just gets on my nerves but that doesn’t mean i won’t need this someday for somebody.
• Map your users using the Google Maps API — Everybody likes to know where they are I guess.
• Caching PHP pages — If you need a quick introduction to html caching this article introduces a couple different existing solutions.
• SMTP legacy — Here is a tip that I know lots of code didn’t take into consideration, especially the spammers that hit my mail box incessantly! At least spam me with something that works right.
• Widgetize This — If you use WordPress this might be useful.

Phing

I use phing for automating my build process so I was very interested in these two articles. PHPUnit test and Code Coverage Statistics with phing and Simple Database migrations with phing and dbdeploy.

Zend Stuff

Compared to other frameworks there are way way more articles written on the Zend Framework, Since I don’t use it I usually just skim over them. So for now I won’t be writing much about Zend Framework specific articles. I will however post the links for those that do

• Zend Framework: Should Forms Save Themselves?
• Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine
• Zend Framework Articles and Tutorials
• Front Controller Plugins in Zend Framework

Books

Davey Shafik announced a new book on php streams due out in Q3 2008. Thats a topic I never thought there might be a book for. Ivo Jansch has a review for those interested in php|a’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework.

Oh and one more. I missed this one and had to stick it in here after I had finished the post for the week Review: PHP5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content.

Neat Stuff

I haven’t installed this yet but I’m going to later on today.. its a pretty neat idea Google Toolbar button for PHP Reference, it lets you highlight text on a web page and search for that text on php.net. Oh yeah and this, everybody has probably already seen the SEO Wrapper but I just had to watch it again. How do people find the time?

Congrats

Congratulations are due to phpdeveloper.org on reaching 10K posts. It as one of the first resources I discovered when first starting with PHP.

Brian Moon just realized that phorum turned 10 last week. What is that about a billion years in internet time?

All over the place

Articles this last week were all over the place, from this article on project-zero running a major php application on something other than the Zend platform to Drupal is Part of the Problem and PHP is Dead, both telling us how PHP is going to die if we don’t do something now! I have an opinion on this but not the energy to argue it right now, so I’ll keep it to myself for today.

LSB

If you are interested in Late Static Binding or LSB in future versions of PHP take a look at Late Static Binding (LSB) forward_static_call() I have been looking forward to LSB, it will eliminate some ugly hacks I have used to get around the lack of it, but I think this solution isn’t the most elegant, unfortunately I am not able to articulate what I do want it to look like in any intelligent way except different, or in the authors words “It would be alot less awkward and imo closer to what the average oo programmer would expect.”.

Google App Engine

I love this — Why not PHP for Google’s App Engine? and Google App Engine needs PHP support… well why not any number of languages. Seriously if you go read here you will see “Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, we look forward to supporting more languages in the future.”, okay? I guess the better question is why not PHP first? Whatever the reason, Google is a public corporation and is under no obligation to support anyones favorite language on their new platform, they only have an obligation to make money, its not like they just overlooked PHP somehow, they made a conscious choice to support python first.

Books and Reviews

I am really glad that Cal Evens has an in with apress, the sample chapter he picked to share with us was the exact one I would have picked myself — go check it out at Sample Chapter From Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More. It covers the SPL, a topic thats really hard to find information on.

I used to do quite a bit of Joomla work and when 1.5 came out I toyed around a bit but things had changed enough that it wasn’t all that easy to just jump in and go, I wish I’d had this book Mastering Joomla 1.5 at the time, the review sounds like it would have helped.

For all you Codeigniter fans Ken Guest has a review of Code Igniter for Rapid PHP Application Development, it sounds like the book was okay but not good enough to persuade him to use codeigniter.

Code and stuff

I really really need to gather up all the techniques and ideas I’ve learned about the SPL and write an article, it seems to be like a hidden easter egg as far as documentation and unexplored features go. PHP, PEAR. PHP 5.3: SPL stack, heap, queue, list covers some more undocumented data structures.

I don’t know anything at all about this framework but I do think the link I found there to GRC Perfect Paper Passwords is interesting!

Yahoo! Pipes announced an option for PHP serialized output., if Google Apps won’t give us PHP support at least Pipes will spit PHP.

I am often surprised when I find content tagged in ways I would have never in a million years related to it, until of course I saw the tag. The class in the article Open Calais Tags might be what I need, I’m sure it will make its way into Zend Framework by next week. Oh YAY it is what I need all wrapped up in WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin.

I’ve been reading along with this series Rolling Your Own MVC: The Page Load Scenario while most developers with a firm grasp of MVC will probably not find it all that interesting I like looking at other interpretations of what an MVC based framework should look like.

Five common PHP design patterns, okay I want to know something, I can search for and find these five common patterns covered in at least 10 different articles, some very well, why doesn’t somebody write about Five uncommonly undocumented PHP design patterns That would be something interesting to read. That isn’t to say the article wasn’t okay, it was, it just covered more of the same old same old.

Advocacy

Lukas Smith has put up a mission statement and a call for discussion on emPHPower.org drop over there and find out how to join the discussion.

Done

I’m out of time, I know I miss articles every week, sometimes the signal to noise ratio is overwhelming, If it bugs you then comment on it, maybe I just never see them. Maybe they were just really bad and I didn’t have anything to say (nice), but If you want to be SURE that I see your work and can let others know about it, you might want to let me know what I’m missing.

April fools came and went, I didn’t get fooled. Thats sad, I love April fools day and this had to be the lamest year ever.

It was spring cleaning time this weekend so my computers were all unhooked and disassembled this weekend while everything was scrubbed clean. That spilled over into Monday which has now become Tuesday. That means everybody gets a break from my weekly reviews. Except this little tiny bit:

Subtle Digs

This caught my interest DHH on PHP. Maybe I’m just reading between the lines but “scales down” and “tackling that scope” isn’t exactly praise. I really don’t think that pointing to that blurb and saying “see, see.I told you PHP was good stuff.” is all that flattering to PHP. I wonder if anybody else thought it wasn’t? Immediacy and frameworks points out some advantages that this immediacy gives. I think people are a little confused when they compare a language (PHP) with a framework ROR)

Shorted

I know this post got the short end of spring cleaning weekend. I promise next week will be uhhh… Better!

There are is fundamental concept that I see in this vision:
emPHPower is a mediator and catalyst that empowers members of the community to follow their own ideas

Professional Organizations Matter

I have been a member of a much smaller organization which adopted a similar mission. The reputation and livelihoods of this group had been damaged by years of infighting, bad legislation and no clear vision of of the future, not all of these are problems we face in the PHP community but the concepts behind organization are the same.

We paid dues, hired lobbyists, and as a group decided the direction we would like to go in. Within a year of going from individuals without a consensus and almost no voice to a professional organized group we had achieved things well beyond our wildest expectations, so I can speak from direct experience –this works.

Knowing where you are going!

When these types of initiatives begin the first hurdle is deciding what the mission is and bringing a multitude of conflicting ideas into something cohesive and meaningful.

That is where Lukas is asking that the community get involved:

So I would like to open up discussion to the general community. I want, and obviously need the community, to participate in working out this idea. That being said, I am sure that it will be impossible to please everyone. To me the key is to keep a clear vision instead of trying to do too much. Also as opinions will differ, in the end it will take the dedication of a small group of people to pull this thing through.

I have some ideas about where I would like to go with such an organization. I would like to see greater involvement by the PHP community itself in promoting and establishing guidelines for certification, best practices and a higher level of professionalism. Thats not mentioned in the scope of the original article, but thats my personal interest in such an organization among other things.

Do you have other ideas? I’m sure your vision is not the same as mine or Lukas or then again it may be, nobody will know unless you step up and join the discussion, until you begin to participate this vision Lukas has will go nowhere.

Go read the original article and join in the discussion.

Oh yeah, did I mention I hate the name? Just kidding I know its just a “code” name, I just keep imagining trying to pronounce it.