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.

Matthew Turland has a few things to say about web scraping (and recent articles covering it) on his blog today as an author of a previous article published in php|architect covering the same topic:

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless pointed a post out to me on the PHP DZone web site recently. Noting that the article's content was misinformed at best and downright ignorant at worst, even when examining it sheerly from the author's knowledge of PHP as a language, this friend asked that I set the author straight.

He mentions his comments on the post correcting the author on some points as well as a more "clued in" post on the xml.lt website talking about using PHP's DOM functionality instead.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial that walks through the complete steps of setting up a Fedora 8 linux server with a full LAMP stack complete with email, DNS, FTP and ISPConfig support. They call it the "Perfect Server".

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

It's a seven page process with plenty of screenshots and settings to help make the installation nice and easy.

Bill Staples has a new summary post on his IIS blog today covering some of the new things that IIS7 has to offer its community. Three of these pertain to PHP:

• A tutorial from Sabbir about installing PHP and MYSQL on an IIS server to get phpMyAdmin up and running (part one).
• A post from Drew Robbins about extensibility in PHP applications running on IIS.
• A how-to screencast on getting PHP and FastCGI working happily with IIS.

The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial posted showing how to get the popular PHP-based content maagement system, Xoops installed and working on your Ubuntu linux machine.

I want to show you how to install Xoops on Ubuntu. I used the Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition, but it will probably work on other systems as well. Xoops is a modern Content-Management-System which can be extended with a variety of modules. Further information about Xoops can be read on the official Website.

The process is pretty simple, there's basically only four or five main steps to the process, but some have several substeps (like the Xoops install screens that take up a lot of step four).

Tony Bibbs has posted a handy howto guide on publishing your application via a PEAR channel:

I have produced a HOWTO for both our system administrators and our developers. I've condensed this down to be a bit more generic and useful to anybody looking to establish their own PEAR Channel for the same purpose. My example hereon is that your channel is at pear.example.com.

Come along on the journey of a developer making their very first PEAR package and deploying it to a PEAR channel using a real-word example. Seasoned PHP developers be packaging and deploying PEAR compatible packages in no time.

He walks you through how to install the PEAR package creator, package up your application into a PEAR package, and how to make it available anyone and everyone that wants to give it a shot (including the PEAR commands they'll need to get it).

In this new guide from the HowTo Forge, they show you how to build, from scratch, a complete LAMP system on top of the Fedora Core 6 distribution.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora Core 6 based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora Core 6, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

The install uses Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, BIND9, proftpd, dovecot, and Webalizer to round out the system. There's screenshots and steps the whole way, so you're sure to be able to follow along easily. PHP is installed via a package so it makes things simpler.

Scott Johnson is back today with another podcast, this time, focusing on methods for learning PHP. It's targeted at the very beginner level (PHP) developer to provide them with the tools and knowledge they'd need to advance in the language.

He recommends three steps to follow to help you on your way:

• purchase/borrow the Sams Publishing book from Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, "PHP and MySQL Web Development"
• listen to the podcast he's created
• and the most important step of all - code (practice).

People without experience in programming tend to think that you need ot learn everything about the language first, then try to go code something in it. Unfortunately, they realize (sometimes after a lot of work already) that that's just not the way to go.

Find a project - simple or hard - just find one. Even if you don't know the "best" way to do it, try. It can only help, and trust me, you'll learn more from doing than just reading any day. The book is a great starting place, and good for examples, but the real learning happens when developers do what they're meant to do - develop.

WeberDev.com has this new article today, an introduction to some PHP5 functionality that doesn't seem to get used so much - the SimpleXML functions. The tutorial provides an introduction to the topic, and includes several code examples to get you started.

They describe what it is, how it works, and what kind of situations it's best suited for before getting into the code. They show you how to reference values as objects, grab their attributes, and how to use the XPath function to pick out just the data you need.

Yet another fine tutorial has been posted over on PHPit.net today, this time dealing with the use of the cURL library in PHP.

This article doesn't look to be comprehensive on the topic, but does provide a great introduction to the hows and whys of using cURL in PHP. There's no installation procedures here, so you'll need to already have it installed, but other than that, you should have a great grasp on things by the time you're through.