On NetTuts.com today there a new article with what they think is the best way to learn PHP in a list of thirteen different "assignments".

Learning something from scratch is almost always an arduous affair - you simply have no idea as to where to start, or not to start, to kick things off. I loathed learning about the idiosyncrasies of C++'s syntax when all I wanted to learn were some darn programming concepts. As I'm sure you can agree, this is a less than ideal situation. [...] Today, we're going to figure out the best way to learn PHP.

Among their list of "assignments" are things like:

• Disregard the Naysayers
• Read a Few, Good Books
• Create Something Simple
• Try out a Lean, Lightweight Framework
• Build Something Awesome
• Get Involved and Be Up to Date

There's also some good comments with suggestions of other frameworks to learn, things to try out and a few comments that put an emphasis on learning the language before diving directly into a framework.

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.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post from Cal Evans about five ways to get involved in the PHP community that take about five minutes each (and can both help you and the community).

ome developers develop because it pays the bills. They don't want to be part of the community, they have other passions. I am ok with that, I don't want anyone involved who doesn't want to be. Other developers however tell me they didn't know the community existed, they don't know how to get involved or they are just too shy to step up. It is to this second group (and anyone who is already involved but wants more) that I want to talk to. If you want to get involved in the PHP community here are 5 quick ideas to get you going.

His five things are simple and cover a lot of different media, from blogs to twitter:

• Email your local PHP User Group and offer to speak.
• Setup a PHP tag on your blog.
• Submit something to DevZone!
• Re-tweet something about PHP.
• Find at least one other PHP developer that is not involved in the PHP community and convince them to read this list and take action.

He equates this last one to a "chain letter" but it's key to helping th community grow. It's all about people getting together around a language they love and sharing that with more and more people.

In this new post Bradley Holt shares some of the results he found in questioning his local user group about why they would get involved with the user group.

This was certainly not a scientific survey and there were only 16 responses, but it still offers some insight that can be useful in planning user group activities. Here are the top reasons...

The reasons included things like "learning from peers", "meet the experts" and "finding job opportunities". He graphed the results showing that learning from peers and networking came out on top.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post announcing the latest Bug Hunt Days for the Zend Framework happening this week - Thursday, July 15th through Sunday, July 19th.

For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework. The last two months of bug hunts collectively closed 63 issues. The May bug hunt saw new first-time winner Jan Pieper step up and take first. Then in June, Christian Albrecht (a previous bug hunt winner) took home first again. Congratulations Jan & Christian and thanks for making the bug hunt for May and June a success.

If you'd like to get involved, you'll need to have a CLA with Zend approved and ready to go. Then just show up on the #zftalk.dev channel on the Freenode IRC network and jump right in. There's also a guide to help you get started as well.

The Zend Developer Zone has announced the start of October's Bug Hunt Day for the Zend Framework:

As reported last month, Zend Framework has started hosting a monthly "bug hunt": an effort to resolve issues against the framework. This month's bug hunt is today and tomorrow. The individual who helps resolve or assist in resolving the most issues during each month's bug hunt days will receive a Zend Framework t-shirt! Last month's winner was Padraic Brady.

Matthew includes a few reasons to help out - helping ZF helps you (and your projects), adding value to the framework and the development of good QA skills for creating unit tests and documentation. If you'd like more information on how to participate, check out this page of the Zend Framework wiki or just come over to Freenode's #zftalk.dev IRC channel and get involved!

In his latest blog entry looks at something that impressed him about the PHP community in response to this article taking about the speed differences between ASP.NET and PHP.

The PHP community took this in stride because we understand that ASP.NET has its uses and there are situations where it is the better choice. I am proud of the PHP community because no one (as Joe supposed we would) raised the battle flag and flamed him, calling him a Microsoft shill.

He talks about how far the PHP community has come and why it's become as strong as it is - core developers involved in everyday things, respect for other community members and how there's "always a spot at the table" for any PHP developer to come and share stories or just enjoy those of others.

Cal also includes some good tips for getting involved in your local and the global communities (like blogging, IRC or contributing back to the PHP project).

On the Blue Parabola blog Keith Casey asks the question "how do you measure an individual's contribution?"

In the past few weeks, I've been working fast and furious at getting web2project to our v1.0 milestone. As part of that effort, I track open issues, problematic modules, community feedback via the forums, death threats via all methods, and other related aspects.

He suggests a few different ideas for measuring how much a user has contributed: lines of code, commit count, issues they've reported, number of issues closed or community involvement. Of course, none of these can truly measure how much an individual has participated in a project, especially since it could be a mix of several of them combined into a whole as the "involvement persona" of any given person.

After taking part in this year's PHP Brasil conference, Chris Jones has issued a challenge to the PHP group members and developers there - do everything you can to be a part of the global PHP community.

At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. [...] In post-conference conversation, Luke Crouch (SourceForge) and I touched on what is gained from attending conferences, and how quickly technology is picked up in Brazil. So, one thing I specifically did during the conference was to encourage the organizers and presenters to make the English speaking world more aware of their activities.

He points out a talk that's already been translated to English and some of the people he met that are part of global PHP-using companies.

According to this post on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, Microsoft has released a new five page PDF file titled "PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance" discussing the relationship between the software giant and the language over recent years.

The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.