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!

In this new post for his blog Brandon Savage takes a look back at his past year with a technology that, back then, was new to him - the Zend Framework.

About a year ago, I was introduced to Zend Framework as the framework I was going to be working with almost every day. And for nearly a year now, every day I have worked closely with Zend Framework, learning it's intricacies and dealing with its warts. [...] A year after adopting it seemed like a good time to reevaluate the framework and reflect. Learning Zend Framework was a daunting, challenging experience that tested myself and those I worked with. I learned a few lessons that I think are important, and I think are worth sharing.

The post talks about the learning process he went through ("learning new tools is not easy. the tool you pick doesn't change that) and some recommendations for those wanting to learn a new technology - not just the Zend Framework: dive in without hesitation and don't doubt your decision until you really get a feel for the technology.

If you've been around the Zend Framework community for any length of time, no doubt you've seen the monthly Bug Hunt Days they put on to help improve the quality of the framework itself. Now that a new year has rolled over Ralph Schindler has taken a look at the past year of Bug Hunt Days to offer a little perspective.

010 closed out on a pretty good note for the Zend Framework developer community. The december bug-hunt closed out with a solid 37 issues (as of Jan. 12, 2011). [...] All in all, 2010 was a fantastic year. With the 10 monthly hunts we put on (every month minus January and March), we closed nearly 500 issues in those 2-3 days on that third week of the month. Our best month was November where we closed around 110 issues. Naturally some months were better than others, but there was never a disappointing turnout.

He gives credit to several of the contributors that have given their time over the months including Ramon H. Ornelas how recieved a grand price of a full license for Zend's Studio 8 product.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos looking back at 2010 an the life of PHP - yet another great year.

2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers. This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

Among the important happenings of this past year he mentions the issues surrounding PHP6, HipHop and PHP running on the Andriod platform. He speculates on a few things that we can expect from PHP in the upcoming year(s) like the release of PHP 5.4. Also included are some updates that were made to the PHPClasses.org site itself.

Elizabeth Naramore, one of the founding members of the PHPWomen group, has posted a new to her blog today. The post is a list of things that've been happening in the group recently but might not be the most public.

Some of the happenings she mentions are the inclusion of a new member, Remi Woler, into their core advisory group, the over 600 members in their forums, ideas for raising money to contribute towards charities and an effort to create and maintain a calendar of events happening in the PHP community.

If you're interested in helping out, drop Elizabeth an email (elizabeth .at. naramore .dot. net) or you can contact any of the other members of the group via their forums or their blogs.

The php|architect podcast has just released its latest episode - "2009 in Review" with plenty of hosts and guests including Marco Tabini, Arbi Arzoumani and Matthew Weier O'Phinney.

Happy 2010! We're back with another episode of the php|architect Podcast. In this episode, which shall henceforth be referred to as the one where Marco realizes that hosting a podcast with bronchitis may not be the best of ideas, our special guest is Zend's Matthew Weier O'Phinney, head of Zend Framework.

They mostly talk about the conferences from the past year including php|tek, ZendCon and the Microsoft Web Developer Summit. You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player, download the mp3 or subscribe to the feed to get the latest updates.

Lars Strojny has posted a leaflet to his blog looking at some of the PHP development practices that should be encouraged in 2009. The list includes:

• Developments to object-oriented code practices
• Using a VCS
• Continuous deployment
• More code testing
• More use of rapid application development tools
• Monitoring of production systems
• Bytecode caching
• and more...

These are just some suggestions of things to look towards including the best if them all - "love your code".

It's been 12 years since the first Oracle PHP extension was committed and Chris Jones takes a brief look back in his latest blog post.

The oracle.c and oracle.h files for the "oracle" PHP extension were checked into the php/fi 2.0 source code by Stig Bakken on this day in 1997.

Chris mentions the directions the extension has headed, when "oci8" became the standard over "oracle" and the PDO driver/extension. You can find more on using PHP & Oracle in the Underground Manual and the PHP Developer Center on the Oracle Technology Network.

PHP was a great year for the PHP community and had both his high moments and its lows (just like any other community on the web) so, in lieu of our usual monthly recap type of year en post, we present a summary of some of the things that happened this past year:

2007 Gave us:

• Plenty to talk about on namespaces
• GoPHP5
• EMFs (Even More Frameworks)
• the mysqlnd driver
• lots of new tutorials
• over 2,500 new PEAR and PECL package releases
• Several new PHP releases (5.2.1, 4.4.5, 4.4.6, 5.2.2, 4.4.7, 5.2.3, 5.2.4 and 5.2.5)
• The End of Life for PHP 4
• The Month of PHP Bugs
• A move for PHP in the Enterprise
• a renewed effort for Unicode support
• releases from the major framework players like CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, Solar
• IBM and Oracle working together with Zend
• Over 130 new job postings
• Increased interest in running PHP on Windows (FastCGI!)
• The creation of and episodes 1 through 30 of the Zend Developer Zone podcast PHP Abstract

Books:

• The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites
• PHP and MySQL by Example
• PHP Solutions
• PHP Programming with PEAR
• PHP in Action
• Pro Drupal Development
• The eZ Components Developers Handbook
• The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition)
• Learning PHP Data Objects
• Enterprise PHP Development (announced)

Conferences:

• 5th Annual eZ Conference
• Vancouver PHP Conference
• php|tek 2007
• Dutch PHP Conference
• SymfonyCamp
• php|works 2007
• Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2007 (including the Unconference)
• DC PHP Conference 2007
• PHP London 2007 Conference

I know there's stuff out there that I've missed, so comment away and let the community know! (I might come back and link all of these things later on)

With the new year upon us, lots of PHP developers in the community have taken time to look back at this past year, both in their own lives and in the time they've spent in the community. Here's just a few:

• Nick Halsead
• Elizabeth Smith
• Matthew Turland
• Ivo Jansch
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Davey Shafik Matthew Weir O'Phinney

Stay tuned to this post for more contributions from the community as they are posted.