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PHP is certainly a language that lets developers do the wrong thing very easily.

Agreed, and there are a lot of bad advice/tutorials out on the web.

Just follow universal tips and common sense. There's nothing language specific about it.

Well, there are some things that are part of the culture in PHP (and Perl) that aren't part of the culture in other languages (say, Java). But some people who need this type of advice don't read posts about other languages, so it's useful to translate it into PHP, so to speak.
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Alex Netkachov has received a lot of undo flack for writing "6 PHP coding tips to write less code" on several social bookmarking/voting sites. I find it rather interesting that so many developers can slam his advice, and yet have trouble really identifying anything wrong with the approach. Oscar you made some good points in your post, but I think Alex did a fine job with his post as well. We are all guilty of using shortcuts, and there was nothing "unreadable" about the techniques he outlined.

There's nothing unreadable about them when you just see one or two of them. Its the overall code style that it can lead to in inexperienced hands which then reflects poorly on PHP as a language. I have no real problems with 1-3, in face I use them on occasion, but usually encapsulated within a function or class that someone else isn't likely to see or care. Also, I didn't slam Alex's advice, I just pointed out that writing less code does not automatically mean you write "better" code, albeit for my definition of better.