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In my most recent post I talked about putting my toes in the Zend Framework water with stand-alone usage of Zend_Cache. This has been a great experience, and since writing the post I’ve been updating my main application with more caching anywhere I can see a benefit.
In the past couple of days I waded [...]

1/7/10 Update:  I submitted this post to Zend Developer Zone and they published it! Short Link: http://dz.zend.com/a/11582
So I finally took the Zend Framework plunge a few weeks ago.  No, I didn’t start building an application with the framework, but I did start investigating some of the ZF classes for stand-alone implementation in my existing projects.
The [...]

Via PHPdeveloper.org, I’ve been following Brandon Savage’s blog for a few months.  Most recently, he’s posted a pair of excellent articles on productive and useless micro-optimizations.  These are code “enhancements” such as “change all print() statements to echo statements because echo is faster”.  Brandon takes a look at several popular micro-enhancements and offers his professional [...]

Fabien Potencier’s latest blog post is yet another entry in the popular debate in the PHP community over templating. Recently, conventional wisdom has swung back to the use of PHP itself for templating, rather than one of the popular but resource intensive template engines like Smarty.
I discussed this myself here. At the time [...]

I gave a live tutorial/demo at work today for room full of folks. I’ve posted the source code and powerpoint below. The title is pretty self explanatory…just a very simple demonstration of AJAX techniques using jQuery JavaScript and PHP on the server side in a very crude Twitter-like mini-posting app.
Basic AJAX with PHP [...]

Let me preface this post by saying I reserve the right to be entirely mistaken, and I invite comments with opposing opinions…hey, maybe I’ll learn something by mouthing off! I know I’m painting with very broad brush-strokes and I expect to be corrected where my statements may be overly generalized.
Now, as to the topic [...]

Samuel Folkes has posted a great article about bad PHP programming habits.  In his article, titled 17 PHP Practices That Should Be Banned Forever, Folkes describes 17 specific behaviors which can lead to bad code, security holes, or both.
Not all of the 17 items are PHP-specific. Not properly commenting your code is of course a [...]

By some accounts there are at least 5 million PHP developers in the world, each with a different skill level. But how did we all become PHP developers? Almost every PHPer has an interesting background story, and it is worth your time to investigate the back-stories of other PHPers you meet.
So lets say [...]

Wonder how many PHP developers there are in your country? Are you curious as to the most popular browser among PHP developers? Manuel Lemos has a new blog post up at PHPclasses.org entitled “How Large Is the PHP Market?”, in which he delves into these questions and more.
Manuel uses a Zend estimate of [...]

Have you avoided adopting a templating engine for your web applications because you are afraid of the learning curve? You’re not alone. I was in the same boat about a year ago.
But, as applications evolve and grow more complex over their lifecycle, separating presentation HTML and “presentation logic” from application logic becomes essential [...]