Yesterday, Mike and I presented our session "Best Practices of PHP Development" at this year's Zend Conference. It was a marathon three hour tutorial first thing in the morning, and we had an incredible turnout, with some fairly enthusiastic people in the audience.

Download the slides slides for PHP Best Practices.

We ended up cutting a ton from the session the night before, as we discovered we actually had way too much material. Amongst the cuts were sections on:

• Comparisons of different coding standards. I'd worked up a comparison of eZ Components and Zend Framework standards to contrast against PEAR's.
• Functional testing. Mike put a lot of effort into the unit testing section, and I'd done an additional section on functional testing — testing against fixtures, such as test databases, sandbox services, etc.
• Repository layout. Mike actually talked about this briefly, but we'd intended to show some designs for subversion layouts, and how to create and use branches and tags.
• Subversion hook scripts. We mentioned their existence, and some uses, but we'd hoped to show how to add these to your repository, and some sample scripts.
• Mailman. How to setup archived mailing lists.
• Capistrano. Mike mentioned this tool in the talk, but did not have time to go into examples of usage.

Basically, most of the topics we covered could have easily been a session in their own right. However, having a big block of time to cover the spectrum I believe helps show how to integrate the individual solutions into a set of cohesive development practices.

I hope to blog about some of the areas we had to skip in coming months.

To those attendees who came to the session yesterday, thank you for being a great audience!