Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

Lists are all the rave these days for bloggers. The reason is obvious, they require very little thought or research to create. So, in keeping with the current trend, here is my list of three lists never want to see again.

3: 5,000 PHP classes and tutorials

Please, write about either classes or tutorials, doing both together means that all you did was put PHP into google, scraped the first 5,000 links and published. Seriously, classes and tutorials are not related, they are separate categories. Why would you feel the need to combine these? Even if you did, it’s already been done to death. I think we can safely say that until after the Mayan calendar ends and he sun explodes, we don’t need another list of PHP classes or tutorials. If you really want to keep up with the latest good tutorials in PHP, check out sites like phpdeveloper.org. Those guys do a great job of finding the best and they never feel the need to give me a list of the Top X.

2: 50 new PHP tricks you didn’t know, didn’t want to know, and will get you fired if you ever use them on the job

Yes there are a lot of ways to do things in PHP, some of them are good, some of them are bad. Some of them are so incredibly bad that recommending them should automatically trigger an Internet worm that formats your hard drive. My favorite tip in bad category is people “discovering” that IF statements don’t have to have curly braces. People, there is a reason we don’t tell new programmers this, it’s a bad idea!

1: Top PHP Frameworks

Look, I know a new PHP framework is born every 12.3 seconds but seriously, there are only a handful of them that will gain enough of a community to become viable. Of those, most change less than once a quarter, even though it feels like they tag a new release nightly. It’s great that you have discovered that PHP has frameworks and googled to find all of them. However, since google has 15,000,000 hits on the search term php frameworks it is safe to assume that you aren’t the first to discover them.

Conclusion

I love the blogosphere. I can find opinions from people I respect and new ideas from friends I’ve not yet met. Whenever I see a list though, I think “someone needed a post and didn’t know what to write”.

If you are using a new PHP class, CMS, framework, or have a new technique you want to share, share it. Write a blog post and tell me how or why it solved your problem; bonus points if you describe the problem that it solved. You are not adding to the conversation is you are just recapping what others have said.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=