Useful Resources

You may find these other sources of information on the web to be useful. We continue to add links in this area as we discover interesting and practical sites that offer information you might find to be helpful.

Account Management

One of the best single sign-on solutions for web applications: CAS
The server is available in both java and ruby versions, I prefer the ruby server because it's easier to setup and customize.

Frameworks

My two favorite frameworks are Ruby on Rails and Symfony (a PHP framwork). Both are MVC based and are very similar to each other. Once you learn one the other is pretty easy.

Internationalization

Internationalization (I18N) in a web application is necessary if you're targeting a global audience, or even if your audience is from multi-lingual cultures. On the web using UTF-8 is the way to go and you'll need to understand the tools that go with the I18N process. Here are some helpful I18N resources:

The granddaddy of software packages for I18N is gettext from the Free Software Foundation's GNU project. The functionality of gettext has been implemented in a great many other libraries for different languages. Translators are also very familiar with the use of gettext and have translation tools that are designed to easily work with the files used by gettext. I've found that using some form of gettext is generally the best approach. You might want the PHP gettext references or the Ruby gettext package.
When working with I18N it is common to have to also deal with Time Zones in your web application. An important thing to note is that within your code if you're keeping track of a timezone offset from UTC then you must allow for a granularity to the minute, not to the hour as many people make the error of doing. Not all time zones are offset from their neigbors by increments of a full hour. Some are just 15 minutes different.

For you Ruby on Rails developers please refer to my guide to I18N for Rails 2.3+ for a lot of helpful details.