On PHPMaster.com there's a new post by Michelle Sanver about The PHP People, a.k.a the PHP community, and some of the great resources you can use to get help on a problem or just reach out and meet some other PHP-ers in your area (or at a national conference!)

If you're ever stuck on a problem, Google it and you'll find a swarm of users have most likely experienced the same issue and have already shared their solution. If it's not out there, ask in a public forum and people will help you find the answer. And if you've managed to solve it yourself, then write about it! That way you'll be contributing to helping others the same way others are willing to help you. That's one part of the PHP community that makes it really stand out - people share their knowledge and are more than willing to help others along their journey with PHP.

Some resources/places to meet like-minded developers include:

• StackOverflow
• Conferences like PFCongres 2011 or PHPNW 11
• Groups like PHPWomen or local user groups

The community in PHP is huge and is growing every day, and it's all about sharing. If you see someone in need and you're able to help, offer him guidance. If you see an open-source project that's great; contribute and help it grow.

On the CohereCommunity.com blog has a (slightly older, but still good) post about communities and the "when" and "where" of them happening.

I'm talking about people trends and community and HOW. WE. CONNECT. I decided to start old school stylie, and looked up the word 'community' in the dictionary. [...] So community literally means to give gifts to and among each other. Which in turn means my community is a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.

They go on to talk about the three key elements any good community relies on - the people that make it up, the places they meet (real or virtual) and the "things" that bring them together.

If I could make a single plea to every researcher, academic, economist and reporter it would be to stop counting us and start communicating with us. Learn more about where, why, and how our communities form, and why they're so important to us (even when they don't make us any money).

If you're not already involved in a local user group or haven't attended a conference, it's an experience completely different than sitting behind the keys, hacking day to day. PHP.net has a list of both PHP conferences and upcoming events - find one near you and make plans to attend. You'll be glad you did!

Even if it's not your first time to attend a tech-related conference, you should take a look at this refresher course from Keith Casey on the Zend Developer Zone for getting the most out of your experience.

To be able to go to any of [the conferences], most likely you had to convince your boss that the conference is relevant to your job, worth the cost, and you'll bring back the best ideas to share. After days (or weeks!) of making your case, they relented and you're getting ready. First of all, congrats. Many bosses don't have the foresight to send their people go to conferences. But that means above all, you have to keep your side of the deal.

He suggests a few things that you can do to not only help you get the most "bang for the buck" when it comes to the content of the conference, but also on the people side of things:

• Meet people
• Take notes and share them
• When in doubt, ask questions
• Eat lunch with different people each day

Of course, as he states, these are just recommendations and what you get out of the conference(s) you attend is really only up to one person - you.

In a recent post to his blog Davey Shafik proposes that you take a look from another angle when considering what to use for a project (PHP, .NET, Java, etc) - think people, not so much technology.

One of the biggest decisions you can make for any project is the environment it which the project will be written. Most developers mistake the word environment for the word "technology" or "software". [...] With this in mind, I then would say that the language capabilities themselves, are the least important factor in choosing your environment. This then brings me neatly to what else that environment encompasses. These, to me, fall into three categories. People, knowledge and penetration.

By breaking it out into these three categories you can better understand what the project needs and which direction it might need to go: can you find skilled people to write the code? do they have access to good resources during development? what kind of market penetration does the technology have?

He evaluates each of these from a PHP perspective with the result of PHP having "the trifecta" - filling all of the requirements to their fullest.

Two bloggers have commented on the recent nomination of Stefan Esser to eWeek's "Top 100 Most Influential People in IT" - Ben Ramsey and Stas (on the PHP 10.0 Blog).

Ben congratulates Stefan for the nomination, for making the list when others in the PHP community didn't.

Stas, on the other hand, disagrees a bit with some of the comments made by the reporter that wrote up Stefan's piece:

I do not see how reporting a bunch of vulnerabilities (most of them fixed by the time of publication - for which thanks to Stefan Esser as the responsible reporter) is "thoroughly exposing the insecure nature of PHP". Bugs and bug reports - including ones that may affect security in one way or another - are nothing but commonplace in both open-source and non-open-source software worlds.

You can check out the full list for yourself on the eWeek site.

For anyone that didn't get to attend this year's php|tek in Chicago, you really should check out this (very through) summary written up over on the PHPWomen.org site by Elizabeth Smith.

Chicago Illinois is the third largest city in the United States. It's also very different in personality and structure than other large US cities, taking on the rather laid back flavor that defines the Midwest, but also has the dubious distinction of being the "travel hub" of the United States. The size and travel possibilities made it an ideal location for the php|tek conference in May, hosted by php|architect.

She talks about the speakers, the location, people she met, keynotes (Rasmus and Marco Tabini) and tons of other great info. Check out the full post for the complete story.

As mentioned in several places (such as a post on php|architect's website), the list of "40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40" has been released and Zend's own Andi Gutmans has made the list.

From the official press release:

Zend Technologies, Inc., The PHP Company, today announced that IDG's Computerworld, the premier source of IT industry news and analysis, selected Andi Gutmans, co-CTO and co-founder of Zend, as one of its "40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40." Gutmans was selected for the award by a panel of Computerworld editors for his pioneering work with PHP 3, continued work with PHP 4 and 5, advancement of business critical rich internet applications, further development of PHP and Java integration, and, most recently, significant contributions to the open source collaboration project Zend Framework.

You can read more about Andi and the other nominees over in the ComputerWorld article highlighting him and the 39 other honorees.

Cal Evans of Zend's Developer Zone (one of the attendees and facilitators of the conference) has posted his own wrapup of life in San Jose for that week, including candid shots and tons of great info for the week.

As I write this, it's Sunday. I'm sitting here in the lobby of the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. [...] Now that I've had a chance to relax and gather my thoughts, let's glance back over the shoulder before packing up for the next conference.

For each day, he gives the highlights, both of the people he met and of the talks/tutorials attended. There's even a few special announcements included that happened during the week - like about the new ZendBox the company will be offering. After-hours activities were mentioned as well, including the "Pirate Party" IBM threw the last night of the conference.

One of the great things about the PHP community is its sense of humor, and after the stir that Cal Evans caused with his PHP "Trading card" game from this year's OSCON, Zend decided to take it a step further and hand out a great freebie at this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo - a full deck of playing cards with the names and faces of different people and Zend products for each of the cards in each suit.

Cal has also been nice enough to post the full listing of the cards over on his Flickr account. The cards include:

The four queens - Sara Golemon, Laura Thomson, Dhwani Vahia, and Joyce Park
• The two jokers - Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski
• The four kings - Rasmus Lerdorf, Wez Furlong, Marcus Boerger, and Rob Richards
• The aces - Zend Products: the Framework, Platform, the Certification, and Zend Studio

After having attended this year's DC PHP Conference, Chris Shiflett has come back with his own recap of the event including talks given and people met.

This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I'm sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.

Talks hhe mentions were Mike Naberezny's look at Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Eli White's High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques talk. He also mentions meeting David Recordon from VeriSign and some work that Damien Seguy on tracking statistics on open phpinfo pages (about half still have register globals on!).