This is appealing at first, as it makes learning the language easy, as well as making PHP do what you want with relative ease when compared to a .NET or Java solution.

However, a major drawback is that it soon becomes the Wild Wild West of coding, where hired guns, who just “get the job done” seem to reign supreme. Yet this is a MAJOR short-sighted view. In the end I can almost guarantee the cowboy you got to wrangle your code did so, in a fairly inconsistent manner, so sure it works great now but if your plan is to scale your application and grow your team, you will soon feel the pain.

The number of freelance, and even web-shops who launch projects without a well-defined requirements document, a good, take time to decide on standard architecture, establish through testing or even care about a coding standards are certainly few and far between.

As a result code is usually sloppy and haphazard, and in the end new developers spend a lot of time getting to grips with the code, and unorthodox system structure.

To add to that there is little to no testing done in a documented manner. Thus if it every happens you want to extend your app or try and get some Venture Capital, what quantitative data can you show potential investors? Does it scale with the current architecture and design? What were the pitfalls and bugs, as well as were they addressed and where?

One of the best ways to get standardised is to make sure you hone your development process bit-by-bit and get the developers to gradually get into good habits like documenting their code accordingly.

1. New Programmers can easily join the development team.
2. Debugging is no longer a myth as you try and trace errors.
3. Allow for easier and more transparent re-factoring, as each aspect of the application becomes clearer.
4. Present a way for non-technical users to at least get a view of what is going on.
5. Improve the chances to grow your application as you can now offer concise documentation and deliver it fast to users who may want to extend your application.

Earlier I did write about the command line, bash shell scripting and why it was important for Web developers.

I still think that every dev, needs to get handy with it, and another reason is a lot of the automated documentation tools are command line based. Of course some have web-based interfaces but most are not as crisp, clear or smooth for me.

In future I think I will look at the list of documentation tools i think are pretty good, but for now I think, just getting into the groove of better documentation is a good thing.

The project was initially developed by Ronald Heft over at  but it is now maintained by TSG. I think that there are currently two really good and free choices when it comes to adding multi-media content to your site, with the TSG podcasting plugin being one and the Blubrry Powerpress Podcast Plugin. Unfortunately it seems that the old podpress plugin that used to be an option isnt really going to be going any further.

Features

1. iTunes Support

If you are an artist or anyone who has a syndicated feed that you wanted to sell on iTunes then this is the plugin for you. It adds in a dedicated feed with the ability to have your podcasts available on iTunes with the addition of the RSS tags. In the case that you will also have a new post, video or show you also have the ability to ping iTunes and let them know yo have something new or updated.

Podcasting mp3 player - podcastingplugin.com

2. Additional Video Support

Occasionally you may need to also have a video post syndicated from your site in addition to the audio podcast you have going. Luckily the TSG Podcasting plugin will also allow you to upload your own video and then have it posted just like it was a regular post. I have not fully tested it out but it could also be possible to add in some of your own ads, from any networks or programs you are affiliated with and have add a simple and easy revenue stream to your site.

Podcasting video support - podcastingplugin.com

3. Multiple Format Feeds

An additional useful feature is the ability to have a variety of feed formats available to get your show or song out there faster and to more people. For example, if you had both video and mp3 recordings on your blog or site, a visitor who may like your show may only want to listen to the mp3 format show, while another visitor may want be comfortable and want all the shows, no matter the format. Well now you can make this easy and convinient for both as you can provide your feeds in multiple formats with seperate urls.

So Visitor A may grab all the mp3 feeds from:

mypodcastsite.com/?feed=podcast&format=mp3
and Visitor B can grab all the feeds from:

mypodcastsite.com/?feed=podcast

4. Well documented and plenty of options

Sometimes the hardest part is not finding the right plugin for the job, its getting it installed and doing what you need it to do with NO hacking. I think once you start hacking at the core you are about to have some problems, especially if there are any updates which would wipe away any changes you may have made to the core.

Fortunately TSG made sure that you could configure the audio player with lots of options and it does not require a PHD. Some of the available options are:

• Auto-start player
• Loop or single play
• Animation
• Time remaining or time elapsed
• Disable track information
• Set the initial volume of the player
• Buffering time for slower connection
• Player encoding type such as mp3
• Check policy for flash in case you have your id3 tags you want read from somewhere else
• Width of the player
• Transparent background
• Background color

Audio player options - podcastingplugin.com

Conclusion

It is always nice to see a plugin that is easy to use, has a lot of options, user-friendly, extensible and light. I think that the ability to customize the various media players is definite plus, as well we iTunes support, and the ability to add a bit more revenue to your site, or get your music out there.

With premium quality for free, and stable feature i think that even i will start to use the TSG WordPress podcasting plugin and see how it works, but in the end an alternative solution if you are trying to get heard.

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Often it is the case that you want to get extra functionality when you are coding a WordPress plugin or even adding some enhanced functionality such as grabbing images using Amazon S3‘s storage system or including flickr images with functionality that you may not find available with many other plugins available.

As a result you often end up including a number of different libraries that may include the functionality that you are looking for. However, in the long run what ends up happening is many of the libraries need updating, but because of real mechanism to alert you that an update is needed other than you manually checking. As a result the risk and potential for exposure to security threats greatly increases.

In Drupal it is possible to merely include these extra libraries as modules, and then from there they are managed by the Drupal uses the system manager to monitor the status of the module and if it needs updating. With this separated the module would then offer hooks and methods for you to access the various parts of the API that you were looking for.

The first thing someone may say that this is essentially just a plugin? This is true, however, i think because of the way that Drupal is structured there were more modules that evolved that were merely hooks to classes that accessed various APIs. One good comparisson on how WordPress and Drupal modules/plugins are written is the Ubercart vs WP-Ecommerce/e-shop/yak.

What makes the Zend Framework for WordPress so good?

Well the answer to that i guess could be best explained using the case in which we used it. We needed to create a simple REST server on a site built on WordPress as well as have a REST client in order to test  the server and send requests. There were a number of classes and libraries out there like:

1. EasyRest Framework
2. PHPClasses REST Server
3. Simple REST

Conclusion

If you are aware of how extensive, and easy to extend the Ubercart API is i think those who have had to work with any of the WordPress equivalents would admit, in terms of flexibility, scalability, and accessibilty from other modules/plugins via an API, Ubercart is a clear winner.

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Whether you are looking to search and add content to your posts from flickr, or you are merely trying to post pictures that you have shared and uploaded to flickr on your site.

If you have ever wanted to do that you may have actually come across one of these plugins.

1. Simple Flickr Plugin
2. WordPress Flickr Manager
3. Flickr Tag Cloud Widget
4. Flick Photo Album

But sometimes you may need more functionality, or want to directly get access to more methods and parameters available on the Flickr API. As a result if the decision is to write your own plugin to get this done, you would likely try and find a 3rd party library to help you get this done faster.

The phpFlickr Library

This is where the phpFlickr library comes in handy. It is possible to actually spend the time going through the API and develop your own library, however you would encounter a number of issues that a more established library or established set of tools may not face.

Plugin Name: phpFlickr library

Plugin URL: http://phpflickr.com/

Demo: http://flyr.whatfettle.com/

Docs: Plugin Documentation

Benefits of choosing phpFlickr vs coding from scratch

1. Speed of development when you are not building from the ground up.
2. Better established libraries are well documented and easy to extend.
3. Caching and storage mechanisms may already be in place whereas from scratch you may have to work this in manually.
4. Strong communities and support  – this would allow you to get support from the community about the library.
5. Better tested and stable – Most of the time you will encounter problems that a more established library may already have encountered and handled. As a developer you will have to spend the time researching and testing what could be simple functionality to keep the application glued together, rather than spend the time on building and testing their apps more advanced functionality.
6. Easy to use and lots of code examples to test and get you going.

Summary

Getting hands-on with an API and getting dirty, digging in and seeing what it can do is often the best way to begin your plugin development if you want to extend a 3rd part API. Using APIs is a great way to integrate lots of dynamic content to your site as well as add extra paths to monetize your blog or website, such as with Amazon, iTunes, themeforest, and affliate networks.

If you are looking to get deeper into the Flickr api or just wanting to get a feel for what the API can do the phpFlickr library certainly had a lot of features to make most things you need to do possible. With the addition of handy extra features like the caching, you can make sure you are not taxing your server bandwith, or making unnecessary calls to the API.