Have you ever worked with a team that had no definitive coding standard? First off, my condolences! If you have, then you may be able to recall the laborious process of deciphering code from other people, trying to understand the code, even feeling like it might be an abomination from another realm or in fact a cat curling up on the keyboard, mashing it mercilessly–yet somehow the code works. Fear not, other people have thought the same about your code simply due to a phenomenon I like to call “My Way”. That is, simply put, what a person considers to be the only solution to a particular problem, in this case, a coding standard that they have acquired over the years and genuinely believe is the best solution to the problem at hand. –by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson

With its inception in PHP 5, the Standard PHP Library, or SPL, focused mainly on allowing classes written by developers to behave like arrays. This was shown in everything from the ”ArrayObject” class and the ”ArrayAccess” and ”Countable” interfaces to the numerous iterator classes and interfaces. Additions and enhancements to the SPL in PHP 5.3 are somewhat of a departure from this. –by Matthew Turland

Team Development has come a long way in recent years. This article discusses the integrations of four great software tools that can be used in concert to make software development more agile. –by Peter B. MacIntyre

In this article, you will find useful advice, tips and tricks on how to split bigger problems into smaller modules. The main example in this article is distinguishing different types of sentences. You will see an approach I find very useful and hopefully while reading this article you get excited about using this in your next project. –by Koen van Urk

Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not “all of them”, you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free. –by Cal Evans

In this column, I want to talk a little bit about something that affects us all as software architects and developers. That is the importance of following common and well-defined standards in our software projects. –by Adrian Webb

Log in to your laptop or home computer, to servers and to your various mail accounts: No matter what you do or where you go, you need passwords, and the actual implementation of a secure yet usable authentication backend is a lot more complex than is visible at first glance. –by Arne Blankerts

Welcome to the first episode of our new Community Column, where we will have community leaders from around the PHP world bringing you news and views from where they are. There is so much happening in the various corners of the community that sometimes it can be hard to keep track, so you can expect to see a few different characters writing here to keep you up to date with what goes on. –by Lorna Jane Mitchell

A problem isn’t truly solved until it’s in the hands of the masses. –by Marco Tabini

Learn more about nl2br() –by Elizabeth Tucker Long

The world keeps changing, and we should too. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long