If you're looking for a way to give back to the PHP community, there's plenty of ways - one of which could be writing for PHPFreaks.com.

We have decided to give people the chance to write tutorials and blog posts for PHP Freaks. [...] You'll be writing about things that are of general interest to PHP developers and you will be writing tutorials for people who are learning about PHP at any level (i.e. from beginner tutorials to advanced topics). We would rather have tutorials that teach programming/coding concepts or theory than specific things, such as a blog.

You'll need to request membership and join the "Authors" group to get started. Check out their list of other criteria you'll need to match too.

There's always lots of happenings each week in the PHP community, and sometimes a weekly summary is a good way to keep up with them all. Wolfgang Drews has put together such a summary for last week with plenty of details and links.

Thinking about what might be of interest to you readers out there, I came up with the idea to summarize what happend last week in phpworld. it's quite interesting that there were some summaries of most relevant mailingslists around at Zend - and that there is a new weekly summary for the Zend framework, but no one ever made a weekly digest of what was relevant in phpworld "the last week". So, all you readers out there, tell me if you like it, then there will be some continuation...

Some of the items mentioned include the release of PHP 5.1.3RC2, Thomas Boutell's move away from developing the GD library for PHP, and several new tutorials.

Over on PHPMac.com today, there's two new beginner tutorials posted - an Introduction to PHP and Writing Form Data to a MySQL Database using PHP.

The intro tutorial starts at the very beginning, showing you how to put PHP code in your HTML pages. They show how to use variables and echo statement to make some simple output.

In the MySQL/Form tutorial, they assume that you have a bit of experience with PHP under your belt (though it's nothing a little searching through the manual couldn't fix). They create a form/script combo that checks to make sure you've entered in information and then, on submit, creates the correct SQL to put it into the database.

Neither of them include anything on installation, so you'll have to either set it up yourself or have a host that already has it installed to work on - though it's pretty easy to find those these days...