On the ZFort Group's site today there's a new post sharing an infrographic about frameworks in PHP. The data was gathered from Google Trends and looks at popularity and provides some detail for each.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from other sources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their January 2013 meeting, a loo at the "Current Trends of the PHP and Open Source Job Market" (from Ari Waller):

The presentation will be an overview of the current employment market and outlook specifically for PHP developers (as well as other Open Source related Open Source trends), based on the current supply and demands in the market place, as well as career oriented topics via Q&A (Resumes, Interviews, and overall job hunting tips and strategies). Ari will cover a year by year comparison from his previous talk and discuss changes and new trends going into 2013. He will also discuss how to work with recruiters as effectively as possible (if at all), as well as questions you have always wanted to ask regarding the the inner workings of IT Staffing.

Despite it being presented by a recruitment company, they have promised an open and honest conversation about the topic, not a sales pitch. If you'd like to attend, check out this page on the Atlanta PHP site for more information - including a new meeting location.

Have a user group meeting or event you'd like announced? let us know!

Doug Hill has decided to start a series on his blog that details some of the happenings in the PHP community for the past week, of which this is the first:

I spend way too much time reading blogs, surfing PHP and web development articles online. I resolve to cut back but things just sneak back into my reader somehow, and believe me dzone doesn't help. But I've came up with a way to justify all that time, I call it research.

He mentions things like the infamous CIO article, Zend's Jolt Award, comparing the Zend Framework versus PEAR and PHP releases, books and various other language-related tidbits.

Check out the post for more and keep an eye on Doug's blog for future weekly summaries.

In his latest, Andrei Zmievski talks a bit about an article over on the Ohloh.net website (statistics site that analyzes the source of Open Source applications) titled "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast".

So far they've indexed over 3,000 projects and their conclusion seems to be that among Web scripting languages, PHP is the undisputed champion (as measured by the LOC count).

He also notes that they've discovered something interesting - despite the lowering numbers of developers/projects being done with PHP, the code and applications seem to be growing still. Andrei interprets this as a positive move for developers away from the "reinvent the wheel" school of thought to a more "find something that works already and go from there".

Check out the original article for more information on the stats and some charts to show the trends.

The Professional PHP blog has created a few graphs with the help of the Google Trends site comparing the usage of four different languages - PHP, Java, C#, and Perl - represented by a handfull of graphs.

The graphs show that, besides Java's stats slowly dropping and PHP holding steady, Ruby still just doesn't compare to the two, and Ruby on Rails even less. What's interesting is the move from more Struts-style frameworks to more of a "Ruby clone" setup, with the gap only widening as things go along. Also, on a slightly related note, the results for Ajax versus Javascript are showing an ever-widening gap - in favor of Ajax.

DynamicWebPages.de has posted some information about PHP's presence at this year's LinuxTag Conference where there will be no official PHP track, but will be several PHP-related talks.