As is mentioned by Matthew Weier O'Phinney (and expanded on by Robert Basic) beginning immediately, the Zend Framework 2 project will no longer require developers to sign a CLA before submitting their code.

In #zf2 news, effective immediately, we no longer require a CLA for #zf2 contributions. Let the pull requests flow!

Robert gives a bit more detail in his post, pointing out the official git repo, the issues list, section on the wiki and the mailing list/IRC meetings. There's also a blog to follow to get the latest updates for the project.

If you'd like to find out more about this new version of the framework, check out this video from ZendCon by Matthew.

Philip Olson has a (tongue-in-cheek) post to his blog today about how PHP can make the most of its popularity financially.

Today Rasmus mentioned that he received a $500 offer for the php.net domain name. Discussion ensued, which ultimately led to the indisputable belief that php.net is worth over 10 million US dollars. Therefore, let's think about this further...

He compares the worth of several popular languages (with a "reliable source") and does some math where PHP.net account holders would profit from the popularity over other languages. On a bit more serious note, though, he points out a few ways that you can contribute or get involved in the PHP project on several fronts:

• Help by editing documentation
• Sign up for a mailing list or three
• Get a SVN account and start contributing back to the code

On the Zend Developer Zone Cal Evans has posted some encouragement about sharing your own thoughts about the post from Dried Buytaert about the future of PHP and Drupal.

As Dries says in his blog:

It seems that we have arrived at a point in which there is a symbiotic relationship between PHP and the most popular PHP applications. A relationship that did not exist when PHP was created. Symbiotic relationships are obligatory: we depend entirely on each other for survival. And yet, I feel like we've been living apart. It makes sense for us (i.e, application developers) to contribute to the development of PHP, and for the PHP core developers to work more closely with the developers of the most popular PHP applications.

He points out that, in Acquia's case, there's just not enough time for the group to contribute back to the PHP project. Other posts surrounding this same discussion have also noted that there's not a good mechanism for people to "give back" to the PHP project and that getting involved requires a certain skillset that lots of developers don't have.

If you've been looking to get involved in the Zend Framework project but haven't known where to get started, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has just to guide for you. It gives you the "short and sweet" things you'll need to know about contributing back to the project.

ZF2 development is ramping up. We've been at it for some time now, but mostly taking care of infrastructure: converting to namespaces, re-working our exception strategy, improving our test suites, and improving our autoloading and plugin loading strategies to be more performant and flexible. Today, we're actively working on the MVC milestone, which we expect to be one of the last major pieces necessary for developers to start developing on top of ZF2. A question I receive often is: "How can I contribute to ZF2?" Consider this your guide.

He talks about what you'll need to get started (including getting a CLA) and includes a few links to some resources to help you get the code you'll need and find some bugs to fix (or file one yourself). He also talks about the details of the project (like naming conventions), where it stands now and what sorts of things you can get started doing right away.

Till Klampaeckel has posted a few suggestions for you if you'd like the take the reigns of a PEAR package when it's not maintained.

One of the more frequent questions I see on the mailing lists and IRC is, "How do I take over a package?". Very often people start to use a PEAR package and then at some point encounter either a bug or they miss a certain feature. The package's state however is inactive or flat unmaintained.

He recommends a few different courses of action - first asking if there's a way to help out, then stepping it up and pushing the fixes in yourself and, finally, deciding if you really do want to maintain the package (and show it by contributing).

If you've been looking for an open source project to get involved with and have thought about one of the many PHP frameworks out there as a viable option, you should take a look at Phil Sturgeon's guide to getting involved with CodeIgniter and some of the recent major changes the project's seen.

Now that CodeIgniter (Reactor) 2.0 is out people are starting to get involved, which is great. [...] what makes Reactor so much more different than CodeIgniter has been in the past? Well that is easy, anyone can be involved whether you are a hard-core developer who is happy to jump into the codebase and start changing things and adding features, or a new user who just wants to request some new features, you can do this on the UserVoice.

He talks about some of the things you can expect from the Engineers (the team heading up the development of the Reactor branch) and some of the things you can do with your code contribution to help it get accepted more readily.

In Padraic Brady's latest post he makes a pitch for developers out there to get in on the development of the Zend Framework version 2.0 "before the offer ends" in a few different ways.

Zend Framework 2.0 recently passed Milestone 1 on its development track and is rocking on PHP 5.3 in all its namespaced glory. Milestone 2 is the introduction of the new Exception regime to ensure all of the frameworks' fun components throw Exceptions that are specific enough to be useful. Why waste your idleness on the Devil's work when you can be bringing salvation to armies of PHP programmers?

He links to some great resources if you want to get involved including the list of who's working on the exceptions handling, a link to the components and maintainers list for the framework and at getting started with Git guide to introduce you to the version control you'll need to use.

On the ThinkPHP blog today there's this new post talking about open source contribution and, more specifically, making contributions to a popular PHP project - the Zend Framework.

Who hasn't ever started writing his own Framework/CMS? It is considered best practice for learning purposes, but going through all the security stuff can be stressful and boring at the same time. That's where most devs start to contribute to big Open Source-projects like Typo3 or the Zend Framework, because they are already experienced working with it and yet evolving another system on the market or even getting people to contribute seems like an unachievable task.

They talk about the evangelizing that all of the Zend Framework tutorial posts do to further the cause of ZF use and how they can help introduce beginners to the framework even easier than them trying to submit bugfixes right from the start. They also talk about the process of contributing back to the Zend Framework - signing a CLA, reading the standards, grabbing the code from the subversion server and checking out the bug tracker for things to get in and fix (and write unit tests for, of course).

If you've ever wanted to get involved in the open source world but didn't quite know where to start, Stefan Koopmanschap has a great guide posted to his blog with some tips on getting yourself out there.

Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.

He looks at things like finding the right project for you and some of the ways that you can give back to that project including:

• Core code/patches
• Plugins
• Documentation
• Promotion
• Deliver presentations
• Support

He expands out each topic mentioning more specifics on what that contribution type entails and even a few examples of projects on some of them.

Have a flair for translation and want to help out an open source project in need? Consider helping the Symfony Project with their translation efforts for their manual.

The Symfony2 documentation is written in English and many people are involved in the translation process. First, become familiar with the markup language used by the documentation. Then, subscribe to the Symfony docs mailing-list, as collaboration happens there. Finally, find the master repository for the language you want to contribute for.

Full details on what they need help on and where/how to get involved are on the documentation page of the new Symfony 2 website.