According to a new post to their blog, the PHPWomen group has announced a partnership program for projects that want to put out a message of encouraging diversity in contributors:

As quoted from the information page about the partnerships:

PHPWomen has launched a partnership program for open source projects that are committed to embracing diversity and providing a welcoming and friendly atmosphere for contributors. We work closely with project leaders to identify specific areas of need, and will actively encourage our members to participate by promoting those needs through various channels. In return, the project leaders will ensure that newcomers to their projects will be welcomed and their contributions appreciated. This includes fostering an open and friendly environment for all newcomers, not just females.

The goal of the project is to encourage inviting environments for open source projects where developers feel like they're given a chance to contribute equally and to provide something more specific than "here's a project that needs help - go for it".

There's already several projects that are on the list including Spaz and the PHP Documentation team. You can find out more specifics on what they're looking for in contributions on the Opportunities page.

Following up on their Symfony Live conference just held in Paris last week, the Symfony blog has gathered together content from all around the web talking about the event and sharing some of the opinions from those who attended.

A conference such as Symfony Live always generates a lot of buzz. Especially when there are interesting announcements or rumours are made. This post will give you an overview of the community response to Symfony Live from various blogs and social networks.

There's plenty of content here - blog posts (in multiple languages), pictures on Flickr, a video on Vimeo and plenty of Twitter posts based on the "#sflive2010" hastag. The overall impression was great and it seemed like just about everyone in attendance (well, of those that posted about it) seemed to enjoy the event.

You can also read some of the Symfony blog's own recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 for more specifics of what happened each day.

Jayson Maynard (recently taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of the Zend Developer Zone) has resolved to make the resource into a better place for PHP developers to find both the introductory content and information on more advanced topics. He talks about it in a recent post:

We will be rebuilding ZDZ from the ground up and in full public view of the community -- to act as a learning experience and a showcase for PHP best practices. [...] And the best way for it to be a showcase is for us to make all of the process of working on the infrastructure completely transparent; to make the artifacts (code, scripts, configuration, machine images) readily available and to allow contributions from the community.

There's some more specific topics he mentions that the site will cover including new features on articles and community interaction, a new infrastructure and new processes including things like Agile development, testing and deployment. In one of his first steps to better the site, however, he learned a lesson the hard way when he tried to upgrade a package and it brought the site to a grinding halt.

The web has been buzzing since Facebook announced their HipHop tool for PHP applications. Here's some of the comments and reactions people (and companies) around the PHP community have had to the announcement:

• The Echolibre blog
• Christian Stocker
• Brandon Savage
• Philip Olson
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Marco Tabini
• Chris Jones (Oracle)
• Terry Chay
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Stuart Herbert
• Vid Luther
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• SitePoint PHP blog
• Stanislav Malyshev
• Lukas Smith
• Stefan Priebsch
• the ServerGrove blog
• Shawn Stratton
• Jake Smith

Check back for more to be added to the list as they are shared with the community.

With 2009 over, it gives us a chance to look back at the previous year and at some the good things that happened and at how the PHP community as a whole grew and shifted dramatically during the year.

First I'll start with some of our own statistics - we had over 2100 news stories added during 2009 with over 80 job postings, 330+ mentioning the Zend Framework and, yes, even about 80 mentioning "the cloud". We also blew past our ten thousandth post mark and are already up into the 13k range!

The PHP community saw some of the usual happenings - the conferences like php|tek, the Dutch PHP Conference and the TestFest - but there were also a few surprises like the CodeWorks touring conference and the coining of the term "funemployment" to define the large group of PHP community members making changes in their jobs.

This year also saw the release of one of the most important versions of PHP in a good while - PHP 5.3. This update included a lot of what had been previously predicted in PHP6 and wrapped it all up in a nice little package. There was also a renewed interesting in code quality, metrics, unit testing and code deployment. It wasn't just about the code anymore, it became more about the ecosystem it lives in.

The community itself also saw a big change and a broadening of scope. Frameworks were no longer seen as a novelty and started to take root and really be the foundations that applications were built on. The community accepted this and other great tools as essential to their development. On the whole, the PHP community really matured this past year - PHP has come up from being the plucky little language that could and has grown into an enterprise-level (and very capable) language that is flexible enough to not only contend with "the big boy languages" out there, but has also been known to give several companies a leg up. The community has been there to respond and several sources are predicting that the demand for good PHP developers in 2010 will be high.

Community Thoughts:

• Lorna Mitchell
• Matthew Turland
• Rob Allen
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Davey Shafik
• John Martic
• the Echolibre blog
• Keith Casey
• Ivo Jansch (on the Ibuildings blog)
• Ligaya Turmelle

In response to a blog post about a Google ad from Microsoft (seen here) by a member of the Drupal community, Mark Brown of the Web Platform group at Microsoft has posted an apology for the "Forget Drupal..." tagline the ad sported.

First, I want to offer my sincerest apology for this. I have contacted Google and we are working on having this ad pulled as soon as possible. In addition we are working internally to ensure this doesn't happen again. Second, I want the Drupal Community to know that Microsoft and the Drupal Community have been working together for some time now to make Drupal better on Windows.

Mark also points out that there's a lot of marketing Microsoft is doing all around the world to help promote the Drupal project (especially with it being one of the initial PHP packages in their Web Platform Installer). The ad was found and has been removed from circulation.

On his blog Brandon Savage has a response to some of the comments that have been going around about the WordPress community, the software and the opinions the PHP community at large seems to have of them.

Keith made his point clear when I explained to him that I agreed with what Aaron was saying in his blog post, but that Wordpress supporting PHP 4 was Wordpress' "fatal flaw." In his...articulate way...he reminded me that Wordpress existed and flourished, in spite of our attempts to attack their support for PHP 4. Their use of PHP 4 was certainly not a fatal flaw, as much as our arrogance as a community seems to be.

As Brandon points out (agreeing with Keith Casey) that the PHP community can be harsh on certain projects because of their choices when, really, we're all in the same boat - some people still have to support that legacy PHP4 code no matter how much work is put into the PHP5 versions. Don't just go along with the crowd, taking the easy stance of bashing the software or the community - so something about it and help start change.

According to the latest results for the TIOBE community index, PHP has made it into the top three in the monthly-updated list of programming language popularity.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. [...] PHP enters top 3 for the first time.

PHP pushed ahead of now number four on the list, C++, with an almost one percent gain jumping up from number five on the previous month's list. The post includes graphs showing the trends and a link to the definition of the reports.

In a new post to his blog Samuel Folkes expresses some concerns with the PHP community - not in how strong it is but how it might be making things harder for those new to the language.

Please, don't get me wrong, I am not at all implying that the PHP community has gotten any weaker. In fact I think that it is strengthening at a rapid rate due mainly to the fact that the language itself is becoming more robust and mature. The issue I have however is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to learn PHP. Just pure PHP.

He goes on to say that some of the concepts (higher level concepts at least) can overwhelm beginners and may even drive them away from the language all together. He suggests that current PHP developers and members of the community remember how it was when they started and "get back to their roots" and encourage the basics of the language.

As Stefan Koopmanschap mentions in this new post to the Symfony blog, he's started up a new mailing list to help open the lines of communication in the Symfony community.

As I mentioned, I will pick some tasks up myself but I can not do it all! For that reason, I would like to form a group of people who are interested in helping out. Whether you can dedicate only a few hours a month or a day a week, it doesn't matter. Now, I could make my own little list of people who want to help but what use is that when we can openly discuss things. So I have created a new mailinglist just for this purpose: symfony-community.

The mailing list will provide a place for members of the community to talk with each other and work together on the Symfony project as well as being a place where initiatives for the framework can be discussed.