Like it or not, most of us (developers) started learning in a vacuum. We learned and developed habits that worked for us at the moment, but not all of these were things we are now proud to show off. How many of us facepalm when we see our code from 5 years ago? Heck- even 2 years ago! If you don’t follow a standard (or haven’t set guidelines of your own to follow), your code will be inconsistent, hard to follow, and likely, embarrassing to show to others later.

To help highlight some tips and tools to ease your “in-code-sistencies”, we explore code standards and testing in the January issue of php|architect magazine. Read in Andrew Podner’s “Coding Conventions” how, as we share and commit code, standards matter more and more every day.  Once the code is written, it’s important to make sure everything is working correctly. So, while it takes a little more time up front, writing tests will ultimately save you time in debugging. Learn about this as well as tools that can help you make testing easier in “Testing in PHP” by Jeff Carouth. Development isn’t just about good code and efficient tests, learn about the benefits of properly documenting your code – going beyond just commenting – in Chris Tankersley’s “Properly Documenting Your Code”.

In our “Bug Zapper” column, Bart McLeod fixes a bug in the ZF2 documentation. You can follow along as he evaluates the bug, tests, and then submits a pull request for his fix in “Fix the Manual”. We welcome Ben Marks this month with his article “(Re)introducing Magento”, the first in his new series “Shop Talk”, which will explore the world of Magento. Veteran columnist, Matthew Setter, also starts a new column this month titled “Education Station”. This column will introduce new apps, plug-ins, libraries, and contributions to the PHP world. First up is php-markdown, making your markup a snap.

Beth? Oh, she’s off to another conference. In the Editorial, she talks about her recent bout of “Conference Fever”.

Finally{}, Eli talks about php|architect’s new beginnings under the reigns of Musketeers.me.