July was a month of talks and travel, including speaking at OSCON and user group talks to DCPHP and PDXPHP.

Last Friday, I did a webcast as a part of the PHP TEK Webcast series. The webcast was on Caching for WordPress. We had a good turnout, and there were lots of questions about the best plugins to use for WordPress caching.

Anyone who has worked with WordPress knows that it’s greatest strength is also one of it’s greatest weaknesses: it’s architecture. The same architecture that makes it easy to include literally hundreds of plugins also makes it slow, resource-intensive and bulky. Unlike Drupal, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in caching mechanism. What is a developer to do?

I gave a talk at OSCON 2009 called “XDebug Your Code: Tips and Tricks for Writing Bug-Free High Impact Code.” The talk included slides, which are posted here for people to download and use.

One of the greatest things about the PHP community is the willingness of people to help one another. Picture this: you’ve got developers of all levels, working in the same room. They’ve been tasked with working on various open source projects. Only in PHP do you see expert level developers like Eli White, Matthew Turland [...]