Ben Ramsey has a new blog post that mentions a move for the PHP User Group mailing list - putting it official on the php.net services.

You may recall PHP Groups being created over a year ago for the purpose of networking together the leaders and organizers of PHP user groups around the world. I've been very bad about keeping things moving on this front, but I want to pick things back up and get us talking again.

If you'd like to subscribe to the list, send an email to ug-admins-subscribe [at] lists.php.net. If you don't want to subscribe but still want to keep track of what's happening, point your news reader to news://news.php.net/ug.admins.

Lukas Smith has posted a quick emPHPower update to his blog today concerning recent thoughts and progress he's made on the initiative.

I hope this all will lead to a few people to step up and really start getting involved deeply in emPHPower. Aside from this Sebastian has handed in a BOF session on emPHPower for OSCON. I hope this one will work out.

A spot has also been set aside at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo's unconference for someone to speak on the subject and to get a feel for things from the business perspective. Lukas has also been working up more details about the effort and has set up a mailing list to help with collaboration.

Eran Gelperin gives an overview of the current state of overloading abilities PHP has in a new blog post today:

Operator overloading is a programming language features that allows operators to act differently depending on the type of data they are operating on. Since OOP lets us create custom types (classes), there are plenty of opportunities to do useful and interesting code manipulations using operator overloading.

He talks about magic functions, the additions that the SPL made, the PECL addition operator and how much its currently being discussed on the PHP internals list.

In a new post to his blog, Pierre-Alain Joye has a suggestion for mailing list members (and really anyone else involved with the community) for reading materials - a chapter from "Producing Open Source Software".

A must read about OSS is the "Producing Open Source Software" written By Karl Fogel. One chapter covers nearly all problems that php Internals is experiencing.

No need to say that these rules should apply to IRC as well. You may think while reading the mailing lists that a certain level has been reached, what happens on IRC is even worst. Another chapter can be very interesting: Social and Political Infrastructure (and related). Mixing paid developers, volunteers or ambitious developers (as in need of an ego or career booster) is not an easy thing, but it should be possible (dreaming?).

Among the topics discussed in the chapter, Pierre mentions two - "nip rudeness in the bud" to keep things more civil and from escalating and to avoid private discussions about a project that everyone should be involved with.

Lukas Smith has two updates on the previously mentioned database mailing list - both about how you can access the list:

• After all this positive feedback I have asked Ian P. Christian, who is already hosting the doctrine mailing lists, to open up a mailing list for us: mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net
• This list is now also accessible via Gmane(.org): http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.php.dbabstraction nntp://news:gmane.comp.php.dbabstraction

If you're a maintainer of a database abstraction package or just wnt to get into talk more than the usual tech support, be sure to check th mailing list out.

In an effort to somewhat unify the authors of the wide range of PHP database abstraction layers out there in the community, Lukas Smith has proposed a "doctrine miling list" for the discussion of things "like best practices, new discoveries, challenges, etc".

Now I am hoping that all of you are reading this. I know quite a few of you pretty well already (John, Hans, Manuel etc.). [...] So please everybody come out of the woodwork, send me a mail or post a comment.

While I think its fine for end users to also join the list, the goal is not to create a list for end users to ask questions, but more for people who actively develop database abstraction layers. End users should better go to the respective mailing lists.

Ian P. Christian has already stepped up to the plate and is offering a mailing list that you, the database abstraction developer can subscribe to - mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net. Be sure to check out the comments for more great discussion.

According to this new post on the Inside Open Source blog from APress, Andi Gutmas has made a for a new syntax to be added to the existing array functionality in PHP.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted both the Zend Weekly Summaries issues #323 and #324.

In #323, there's talk of OpenSSL integration, a CVS server change, and several PHP security discussions (a suggested read).

Issue #324 talks about runtime JIT proposals, debugging overloaded objects, more on PHP security, the release of PHP 5.2.1 RC3, and more "fine grained" control over allow_url_*

Be sure to keep up with the latest mailing list and community happenings through these great updates from Steph Fox.

Sara Golemon has posted her own look back at the year of 2006 in the PHP:

Well, Davey Shafik started us off with his year-end wrapup so I'll follow suit with mine. The thoughts below are mine and mildly influenced by alcohol. They represent a foggy review of how I experienced the year through the imperfect recollection of mailing list archives.

She covers each month, looking at the people, events, and releases that happened in each. Lots of activity happened on the mailing lists mirroring the happenings in the rest of the PHP community. Check out her great post for the full happenings of the year.

Tobias Schlitt passed along a note today that they've formed the eZ Components announcement mailinglist for those that want the latest information and updates about the eZ Component system.

We've created the eZ Components announcement mailinglist, which will inform you about all eZ Components releases, as well as other important news regarding eZ Components. It would be great if you subscribe there and post some news on your website about our releases.

You can subscribe to the list yourself by signing up here.