If you're a fan of open source development and can't get enough about projects and what's the latest in the online OS community as a whole, you'll definitely enjoy The Changelog (it's a weekly podcast and news site).

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

On Dzone.com today Giorgio Sironi has posted what he considers to be some of the most popular Open Source PHP projects of 2011 including Symfony2, Doctrine and HipHop.

This non-scientific analysis of the popular and exciting PHP projects starts from researches on active projects on SourceForge and GitHub; the latter is where most of the collaboration and involvement of PHP developers is today. I've also crowdsourced the question on Twitter to catch projects I wasn't aware of, and I hope to do the same with you.

Other projects included in his list are:

• Symfony2 Components
• Moodle
• Composer and Packagist
• Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress

Have a project you think he missed? Let him know!

On SitePoint today there's a new post from Eran Galperin (of Binpress) about how, if you're jumping immediately to custom software development, you're probably doing it wrong.

Code reuse is largely accepted as "best practice" in our industry. Code reuse has many advantages, such as a smaller code-base which is easier to grok for developers. It's easier to maintain and optimize, since you can make less changes in order to achieve the desired results. Many modern techniques and tools were created in order to better reuse and modularize code. But while we're reusing code, we're duplicating effort. The same code is being written over and over in different places, wasting time and money.

He suggests that custom development should always be a last resort for software development, that there's plenty of other (open source) software out there that meets many of the needs businesses have. In his opinion, component-based development is the future of the industry - pieces that fit together with common interfaces and are larger than the sum of their parts. He sees a "commercial open source" model emerging from the current state of things. This model could result in more well maintained OS projects and more functionality being released as a part of it.

What we have currently is increasing noise, as more and more people have easier access to start programming and publishing their projects. We need to streamline the process and add that missing financial element that makes it sustainable and repeatable.

On the WebInsightLab.com blog there's a new post with a long list (30 to be exact) of PHP-based content management systems besides WordPress that you could select from for your next project.

Yes, there are many CMS available for your website, most of them are Open Source. You can not only use them but may modify too according to your need but under GNU license. [...] Now move on to other PHP Based Open Source CMS, following list shows you 30 Open Source CMS besides WordPress which can be useful to build your website and manage your content.

Other content management systems that made their list include:

• Pluck
• Active CMS
• Automne
• concrete5
• Diem
• Dynamix

Each one on the list comes with a brief description of what it offers and where it comes from.

Sad news today from PHPBuilder.com - Tim Perdue, the founder of the PHPBuilder.com site and contributor to the SourceForge project as one of the original developers has passed away at 37.

The PHPBuilder staff was saddened to learn that the founder of our site, Tim Perdue, passed away on September 16 , 2011, after a battle with cancer. At only 37 years of age, Tim's passing came much too soon, but his contributions to the PHP and open source communities assure him a lasting legacy.

Related posts include this tribute from his company, GForge and this article from Jake Ludington on LockerGnome. Digging through our own archives, I found this interview with him back in 2002 (an archive.org link, the original is no longer there).

On the Agile Toolkit blog today there's and interesting article with a slightly misleading title - "How to Earn Money with Open Source?" It talks less about strategies of how to monetize your open source project and more about how other projects are doing it and why a good core team is important.

OpenSource is an amazing phenomena, but how safe open-source projects are? Would commercial project be safer over the community-supported project? Frameworks can't exist without their core team and In this article I look at how different PHP frameworks are supporting their core developers.

He talks briefly about the need for a good, solid group of core developers on a framework (or really any product) to provide a stable foundation if a product was created with it. Four projects are mentioned - Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Agile Toolkit - and why, because of the backing they have from a company and a large group of developers (and contributors) they're not "yet another framework" that'll disappear over time.

Making new frameworks is fun, however, if you share framework with others, be responsible about the support. Make realistic goals and try to have a plan for a next few years. If you are the author, think who will support the community when you decide to move on.

Since the CodeIgniter project has put much more emphasis on open source and having others contribute back to the framework they love, they've had questions about the best places to get started and the steps to contribute back. They've posted this Contribution Guide to help answer some of those questions.

CodeIgniter is a community driven project and accepts contributions of code and documentation from the community. These contributions are made in the form of Issues or Pull Requests on the EllisLab CodeIgniter repository on GitHub.

There's a few helpful hints on things like submission guidelines, the PHP style guide for the project, PHP version compatibility, which branch to submit requests against and a quick how-too guide on getting up and running with git/github if you're not familiar with it.

On VentureBeat today there's a post (the first of two parts) looking at Facebook's involvement in Open Source software, including their work on HipHop and XHP for PHP (an interview with David Recordon and Amir Michael).

The social media company has, without question, taken the time to work on those projects. The hackers at Facebook have done perhaps more than any other single entity to advance and optimize PHP, the programming language on which the network is primarily built.

They talk about some of the projects, both PHP-related and not, that the developers of Facebook have either created or contributed to. There's mentions of Facebook's "hacker culture" and a mention of their workflow and how they decided on going forward with something like HipHop.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted a notice about this month's Bug Hunt Days for the Zend Framework. This month they'll be held July 28th through the 30th.

For those who haven't put the recurring event in their calendar, the Zend Framework Monthly Bug-hunt is here again! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday (the 28th, 29th and 30th of July), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. 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.

He reminds those wanting to participate of a few pieces of information - that they'll need a CLA on file, where to find unresolved issues, getting help on the zftalk.dev IRC channel and a getting started guide for those first-timers.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Keith Casey covering the Karl Fogel book Producing Open Source Software, a guide to organizing and running a successful open source project and its community.

By the time I finished the book a few months later, it rocked my professional world and I couldn't wait to jump into the community fully and completely. To be clear, Karl's book is about the difficulties and challenges of building a team to build a project, but almost all of it is relevant in the building communities in general...

He goes through some of the topics mentioned in the book and highlights three different themes that stood out to him - Political and Social Structure, Communication and one of the most difficult, Managing Volunteers.

So overall, almost every single idea struck me as both blindingly obvious and often missed. And the single best part about this entire book... about 90% of it applies to any project or technical community. Yes, I don't care if you're working on an Open Source project, an internal project, or a commercial shrink-wrapped application. You can use almost any idea from this book and apply it immediately.