In a new post to his blog today Gonzalo Ayuso offers some tips for those out there wanting to cluster their PHP applications effectively.

Sometimes a web server and a database is fair enough to meet our project requirements. But if the project scales we probably need to think in a clustered solution. This post is an attempt at being an unsorted list of ideas working with clustered PHP applications. Maybe more than a list of ideas is a list of problems that you will face when swapping from a standalone server to a clustered server.

He touches on a few different topics you might need to consider:

• consistency in source code
• writing to the file systems
• deployment problems
• authentication/authorization issues
• handling sessions/logs/cache files

On NETTUTS.com today there’s a new tutorial about installing and configuring a secure WordPress installation for your site.

A comprehensive WordPress installation, albeit simple to produce, often requires multiple steps ‘” many of which can easily be omitted accidentally. How many times have you forgotten to customize your permalink structure? How about adding in a sitemap plugin? What about changing your timezone? If you’ve installed WordPress more than once, chances are you’ve missed something. Take the following steps and you’ll never miss anything again.

Some of the steps are larger – “Get WordPress from SVN”, “Add .htaccess Rules”, “Apply the 4G Blacklist” – and some are smaller changes like setting up profiles, changing read/write/discussion settings and generating a sitemap. This is a great guide even if you already have WordPress installed.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Ralph Schindler has posted the results of the latest Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days (for July 2010).

Zend Framework has recently wrapped up it’s July 2010 Bug Hunt with some fantastic results. Collectively, we closed 50 issues in 3 days. That’s nearly twice what we have seen in recent months- a trend we hope continues into the coming months!

Top bug hunters this month were Dolf Schimmel and Ramon Henrique Ornelas tying with 14 bugs each with Michelangelo van Dam coming in third.

The fixes in this bug hunt that have been merged into the 1.10 release branch will see the light of day in our next scheduled mini release 1.10.7 during the week of July 26th.

Job postings for the past week:

• Job Posting: HypedSound Seeks Co-Founder/Lead Developer (Virtual, NYC)

On JoomlaBlogger.net there’s a recent post that wants to help you understand the Joomla templating system in “five easy steps”.

There are very few tutorials on how to build templates. There are two books and a handful of other resources scattered around the web. So, we set out to build the very best template class we could. Here are first five sessions of the class: Joomla templates are not rocket science. You can learn how to build and modify them. We can show you how. Interested?

They break it up into the basic parts:

• Template setup and templateDetails.xml
• Index.php
• CSS/Cascading Style Sheets
• Images
• Security

On the Zend Developer Zone today there’s a new post about the PHP track at this year’s Dallas TechFest (happening July 30th).

On July 30th in DFW, take part in the Dallas TechFest! It is a one day technical conference and we’re happy to say that we have a good PHP track. Let’s blow out the attendance. It’s on a Friday so you won’t be getting anything done anyway.

You can find the full list of speakers (cross-language and platform talks!) on the TechFest site. PHP-related topics include using the Zend Framework, scalable applications and application deployment.

New on his blog today, Simon Jones has posted a handy guide for those using the Zend Framework out there to the stack index for plugins the framework uses.

Zend Framework Controller plugins are a powerful way to inject logic into your controller system at various points, such as before and after an action dispatch. Plugins are run in the order they are added, though it is possible to change the order by defining a custom stack index. ZF internal plugins such as Zend_Controller_Plugin_ErrorHandler, which displays a nice Error 404 page, has a stack index of 999 to ensure it runs at the end of any plugin cycle. However, it’s not so obvious from the ZF manual how to set a custom stack index.

He shows how to use the second parameter of registering a plugin to define the stack level and how to get the listing of the current stack to see just where yours might need to be placed. He also includes code samples and an output example of the default Zend Framework stack.

Stefan Koopmanschap has spoken up in response to some of the comments about OOP design, specifically in using the private scope in your applications. Overall, Stefan agrees and thinks that this access prevents possible extension which goes against the whole point of writing open source software.

I agree with pro-private people that it is important to have a good API design and to use that to protect less experienced developers from making mistakes, however one should never assume that the developers using your libraries, especially Open Source libraries, are less than yourself. [...] I definitely am not in favor of simply opening up the complete library to every developer though. By making a clear decision on which methods are public and which methods are protected you will ensure that people simply implementing your library will use the API that you have taken the time designing.

His does note, however, that there are cases when a private scope is valid – usually when it involves a planned, architected product where it is someone’s responsibility to have that access controlled.

In case you’ve missed the latest happenings in the WordPress community, Marco Tabini is here to catch you up. The issue? Licensing of themes for WordPress.

The WordPress community is abuzz with news that the WP Foundation has essentially gone to war with the makers of the Thesis WP theme. The substance of the argument, as I understand it, is that the makers of WordPress claim that themes, since they rely on WP’s GPL’ed code to run, must be covered by the GPL as well because they are derivative works. Thesis, on the other hand, is distributed under a commercial license, therefore violating this tenet.

Marco talks about all of the legal implications of the issue and some of the stances each side has taken – WordPress saying that since the code has a foundation on it, it must be covered and the themers saying that’s ridiculous. As Marco points out, however, is that the opinions of non-legal professionals doesn’t really matter. What matters is what would hold up if this issue were ever pressed into a legal arena. He even includes some suggestions he wishes the WPF would take to heart including to just back off.

In case you’ve missed the latest happenings in the WordPress community, Marco Tabini is here to catch you up. The issue? Licensing of themes for WordPress.

The WordPress community is abuzz with news that the WP Foundation has essentially gone to war with the makers of the Thesis WP theme. The substance of the argument, as I understand it, is that the makers of WordPress claim that themes, since they rely on WP’s GPL’ed code to run, must be covered by the GPL as well because they are derivative works. Thesis, on the other hand, is distributed under a commercial license, therefore violating this tenet.

Marco talks about all of the legal implications of the issue and some of the stances each side has taken – WordPress saying that since the code has a foundation on it, it must be covered and the themers saying that’s ridiculous. As Marco points out, however, is that the opinions of non-legal professionals doesn’t really matter. What matters is what would hold up if this issue were ever pressed into a legal arena. He even includes some suggestions he wishes the WPF would take to heart including to just back off.