It’s back! - just doing my bit to support the UK’s premiere PHP event. And hats off to them again for honest pricing - no inflation since last year if I remember right: £50 in advance or £75 on the day. Whether I’ll be able to get there is another story but I’d like to.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Posting in the full realization of the futility of doing so, there’s some PHP bashing (as usual) happening on reddit at the moment: PHP vs Python - the real difference, brought on by this mildly amusing image. While I can accept the points - technically it’s actually much harder in handle errors uniformly in PHP and the community is less rich in computer scientists than Python - the corresponding flame war on reddit manages to miss a different point, which is easiest expressed in code.

What’s the most significant difference between these two scripts?

<?php
$hits = 0;
printf ("Hits: %s\n", $hits);
$hits++;

And a web.py controller (absolutely no criticism intended - picked it because I like it - discussion applies to pretty much anything non-CGI and, in fact, t

One of the more challenging things I’ve run into while doing PHP development is effectively separating presentation from program logic. In many projects, I felt I was doing a great job until I had to do a markup change and jump through a lot hurdles to make it happen. In my recent projects, I’ve starting using the HTML Template IT extension in PEAR, and its made things a lot easier.

The HTML Template IT extension provides a solid template system that allows complete separation of code and presentation. Rather than placing markup in your PHP files, the markup is contained within separate template files. Within the markup of these templates are variables that can be replaced by dynamic data when the template is parsed.

It’s easy to identify the replacement variables and the file is simple for a designer to edit. As long as the references are there, they will be replaced when the template is parsed. The main goal here is to provide a method for changing the HTML ma

Object-oriented programming is well and truly in fashion, and PHP is no exception. So you’ve adopted the proper design patterns, built your site on the latest PHP framework, and have your database access abstracted so far that you’ve forgotten SQL.

What’s Going On?

When you first move towards object-oriented programming, the first thing you might notice is that you can give yourself a headache trying to follow the execution path through your code and the framework it’s built on.

The next thing y

The following is republished from the Tech Times #165.

When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so much about the kind of programmer they are. Here’s the question: “In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?”

The reason I like this question is because it tests more than just a candidate’s encyclopedic knowledge of PHP’s functions. Zend’s PHP certification does a good job of that (as does the test that Yahoo! issues to applicants for its PHP developer jobs, apparently).

Rather,