Being a PHP developer is so much more than writing PHP code. A PHP professional is part developer, part scientist, part salesperson and part garbage collector.

Here are five skills that, while not strictly about PHP, will make your chances of landing that PHP job much higher.

Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer made waves when it was announced earlier this month. Now, an initial release is finally available for download and public consumption.

This week’s oddWeek podcast features our friend Nate Abele. We discuss Cake PHP, Lithium and the trials of starting open source projects.

Facebook’s Jason Sobel explains how the social media giant improved their overall end-user performance. This in-depth look at what they did provides a roadmap for any site facing heavy traffic. Oh—and they show you t-shirts you can’t have.

Nothing to see here—quite literally—except a broken network router and 5.5 million page impressions gone the way of the dodo.

The popular open-source PHP debugger written by core developer Derick Rethans is easier than ever to use from your favourite browser.

Lithium 0.6 brings new features, improved bootstrap and a completely revamped template layer to the fledgling PHP 5 framework.

Recent blog posts called into question Adobe’s commitment to open standards and specifically to HTML5. Now John Nack, Adobe employee but not spokes-person, speaks out and gives readers a hint of his true feelings on the matter.

Paul M. Jones, founder and lead developer of the Solar Framework, recently announced the release of Solar Framework 1.0.0Beta4. The very complete and copious release nodes can be found here.

Despite Microsoft SQL Server 2008 having been out for some time, Microsoft is still planning on providing extended support—through 2011—to the 2005 edition of its flagship DBMS.