In an effort to increase awareness about the PHPCommunity.org project, Chris Shiflett has written a new piece for the folks at PHP Magazine - PHP Community: Part I.

This is the story of the PHPCommunity.org project's beginnings. Many lessons have been learned (some the hard way), and the project has already been a big success (without a single line of code being written). How did it happen? To truly understand the answer, I think it is important to describe the motivation behind the project.

He talks about several reasons why a community like this is needed (isolated programmers, lack of a true community, and the missing element in code collaboration). Enter PHPCommunity.org - a place that aims to be a gathering place of sorts, complete with steering committees and voluteers organized into different projects. To help in this collaboration, they've formed the Project groups and created a wiki to allow all users to post their ideas/contributions.

What's Next? During the first few weeks, I found myself being disappointed in the rate of progress. I have since realized that this project has loftier goals than simply creating a Web site. It's uniting a community in the process. As I write this, project leads have been selected, and project mailing lists are alive with discussion. An IRC channel called #phpc is a popular meeting place on freenode.net. CVS accounts are being created. The first signs of real progress are evident. [...] What defines a successful project? It depends completely upon the goals of the project. This project seeks to unite a community, and it has already made great strides toward that goal. The most important lesson that I have learned is that the journey truly is half the fun, if not more.