Are there any good free PHP competency tests out there? It's easy for someone to say they code in PHP, but depth and understanding of how lowerlevel parts of the language are parsed and executed is much different.
Something that asks good questions, perhaps elicit the person to write some sample code solutions to particular problems.
Ideas?
A certification is pretty much a test.
Check out the ZEND certification for PHP.
http://www.zend.com/services/certification/
edit:
Here is free resource: PHP Interview Questions and Answers.
http://www.techinterviews.com/php-interview-questions-and-answers
In the Stackoverflow podcast #79 a service called Codility came up:
There is a website that conducts programming tests on the internet for you at Codility, but we’re skeptical this can actually work without the one-on-one human element of observation.I think it's probably as good as such automated tests can be but agree on the missing human element. It was more fun to solve the test problem in the worst manner that still gets you a score of 100 than to solve it as fast/good/elegant as possible.
Google for "Zend Mock Exam Questions". This will bring up results like this forum thread with questions from the online Mock Exams that are supposed to prepare you for the Zend Certified Engineer exam.
However, if you send applicants questions like this, there is very little that would hinder them from simply googling the answers though, so I find little value in that. Basically, if you got an idea what you are looking for in your applicants, you should be able to ask them the right questions.
Ask them to write an absolutely trivial ‘Hello, $name!’ example that also stores the user-input names to a database.
If they manage to do it without HTML-injection or SQL-injection security holes you've already got someone in top ten percent of PHP coders. If they manage to include proper indenting and maybe a comment then wow! It's a superstar.
I'm not even joking.
Codility would definitely be helpful here - especially with the promotion we are running at the moment. It's still not free though :)
You can use the trial account, if you don't have too many candidates - it has 5 free tests with a limited choice of test tasks. Feel free to e-mail me or catch me on Twitter (@13marcin) if you have any questions.