As mentioned in this new post from the php|architect site, the voting for their 2012 Impact Awards has begun!

We at php|architect want to honor those who give of themselves so that we can work with PHP and in this great ecosystem. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and want to pause to say thank you. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of March and is open to all php|architect subscribers.

The categories for this year's event are "Up & Coming", "Best Cloud Platform" and "Best PHP Application Platform". Nominees across all of the categories include Joind.in, PintLabs, AppFog, Pagoda Box Drupal 7 and SugarCRM. If you're a subscriber, get in there and vote for your favorites!

In this post to DZone.com today, John Esposito points out a site that compares popular PHP frameworks socially, a collaborative resource to keep track of things like framework features, popularity and their last update.

There's this wiki-ish comparison of PHP frameworks from socialcompare.com -- presently incomplete, but already containing quite a few frameworks and interesting details of each. You can add comparison criteria (rows; folksonomically) or update existing criteria -- which currently include, among other details, ORM specifics, cache storage, template system, and testing libraries.

Frameworks currently covered include Zend Framework, CakePHP, Fat-Free, Symfony, Yii and Kohana. As it stands now, Yii is the most popular framework with 8 votes and Symfony and Zend Framework are tied for second with 5 points each.

In this new post to the Symfony Blog, Fabien Potencier shares some of his thoughts about the Symfony community and tosses out an idea of a way to "gameify" the process to let community members proudly show off their level of involvement.

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

In a new post to DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi asks developers what new feature of PHP 5.4 is the most important to you and your application development?

Recently, the voting process for PHP 5.4 open to committers and users have been closed. We now have a clear picture of what will make the release and what will be left out. Some of these features (traits, web server) were already in, while other have been just voted and will be completed before the general availability of the release.

He lists out some of the major changes that'll be coming in the 5.4 release including traits, dereferencing, the built-in HTTP server, closure type hinting and the upload progress feature previously only in an extension. The end of the post includes a poll for you to give your feedback on what you think is the most important. As of the time of this post, the array dereferencing has pulled into the lead with traits coming in second.

Anna Filina, one of the organizers of the ConFoo Conference in Montreal (February 27th through March 2nd) has a new post to her blog about a new process they're trying out this year for the Call for Papers - a public voting feature that allows anyone to voice their opinion on the proposed sessions.

Some of you may have already heard that the ConFoo call for papers is already open. The great thing about it this year, is that it's public. This means that anyone can vote on the proposals. Besides being fun for the speakers and attendees, it opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

She talks about some of the reasons they decided to go this route such as wanting to give the attendees the most "bang for the buck" and the ability for speakers to see what their fellow speakers are proposing and is working. The committee, of course, will have the final say, but the votes will help quite a bit.

If you'd like to vote and are even considering making it to this year's event, go over an sign up to vote on the conference's Call for Papers section.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, Zend has been nominated for the TiE group's top 50 emerging companies for 2009 in their Software category.

TiE is a non-profit organization that has laid the foundation for several hundred startup companies in Silicon Valley. [...] They are hosting their annual conference TieCON in mid May this year in Santa Clara and are expecting over 4000 attendees this year. As part of the conference this year, they are having this competition. Zend Technologies was nominated for the Software category, and out of the ~1200 nominated is now one of the 34 finalists.

You can help Zend make it to the top by casting your vote on the TiE page for "Zend Technologies". They're up against some pretty good competition (including Mint).

Sun is trying to decide which of the PHP frameworks is wants to support in its next version of NetBeans. The symfony group wants you to vote for them if you're a fan of the framework and want to see the support included.

NetBeans, the open-source development environment sponsored by Sun, is planning to include support for PHP frameworks in its upcoming versions. As there are so many PHP frameworks, NetBeans developers have organized a public election to choose the two PHP frameworks that will be initially supported.

Instructions on how to vote are included (you will need to register to get to the voting form).

It's that time of year again - time to gather the votes for this year's PEAR elections for the role of President and others to be inducted into the group.

As every year it is the time of the election for the PEAR Group and PEAR President for the year 2008 and 2009. If you haven't casted your vote just yet, NOW is the perfect time to do it so go to the election page and place your vote.

You can find out more about the elections from the page for the Presidental election and for the Group elections. You must be a PEAR developer in order to vote.

Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

The International PHP Magazine is back with the results on their latest poll today that asked developers to vote on which, of their options, a PHP developer should give the most effort towards when creating their applications.

Options included "Magic Methods", "IDE's" and "Database Support" but the number one option that got the most votes by far was "Classes". This left second ("All" at 19.3 percent) and third ("Database Support" at 8.4 percent) place in the dust.

If you're a CodeIgniter user, be sure to get your vote in on this week's poll asking users to vote on which of the feature options they've given is what makes CodeIgniter the best framework out there.