In this edition I talked with Lorna Jane Mitchell, the Project Lead of Joind.in - built with PHP and proud to be Open-Source. She is the first female PHP programmer I'm interviewing on 7php.com and this makes it a special one. Lorna is a highly respected and highly looked-upon PHPer in the PHP Community with all her active contributions, writing so many insightful PHP articles, co-author of the famous PHP book "PHP Master|Write Cutting-Edge Code" and being a regular speaker at conferences - I was very lucky last week to have been able to attend her LIVE-online talk at Day Camp 4 Developers #4 (@daycamp4devs).

She answers some of the usual questions:

• How she got started with PHP
• Her top advice to PHP developers
• The best PHP book she's read
• What tools she uses for her development

Besides this, she also includes some words of encouragement to developers to get involved, not just in projects but in the PHP community.

At the PHP UK Conference Rasmus mentioned that he wants more people contributing to PHP. There are plenty of ways how you can do that.

Derick points out two more immediate ways you can help, one not even requiring any C knowledge:

• Help test the Release Candidates (like the current PHP 5.4.0 RC8) with a call to "make test" just after your compile.
• The recently added "random PHP bug" functionality that's been added to the bugs.php.net site

In this edition I talked with Cal Evans, the Icon Of The PHP Community. He is to the PHP Community what Pele is to the Football world, just to tell you about the influence he has on the PHP world. He shares, helps, mentors, propagates PHP wherever and as much as he cans. He was previously Chief editor of Zend Technologies (@Zend), worked for iBuildings (@ibuildings) one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe where he lead the growth of a PHP Center of Expertise and ex Mister ZendCon (@zendcon).

In the interview questions ask include topics like:

• How he started with PHP
• His thoughts on the good and bad parts of the language
• How he suggests getting involved in the PHP community
• The best PHP book he's read
• What tools he uses in his development
• A framework recommendation
• and how he defines "the PHP community"

Learning something from scratch is almost always an arduous affair - you simply have no idea as to where to start, or not to start, to kick things off. I loathed learning about the idiosyncrasies of C++'s syntax when all I wanted to learn were some darn programming concepts. As I'm sure you can agree, this is a less than ideal situation. [...] Today, we're going to figure out the best way to learn PHP.

Among their list of "assignments" are things like:

• Disregard the Naysayers
• Read a Few, Good Books
• Create Something Simple
• Try out a Lean, Lightweight Framework
• Build Something Awesome
• Get Involved and Be Up to Date

There's also some good comments with suggestions of other frameworks to learn, things to try out and a few comments that put an emphasis on learning the language before diving directly into a framework.

Now that CodeIgniter (Reactor) 2.0 is out people are starting to get involved, which is great. [...] what makes Reactor so much more different than CodeIgniter has been in the past? Well that is easy, anyone can be involved whether you are a hard-core developer who is happy to jump into the codebase and start changing things and adding features, or a new user who just wants to request some new features, you can do this on the UserVoice.

He talks about some of the things you can expect from the Engineers (the team heading up the development of the Reactor branch) and some of the things you can do with your code contribution to help it get accepted more readily.

ome developers develop because it pays the bills. They don't want to be part of the community, they have other passions. I am ok with that, I don't want anyone involved who doesn't want to be. Other developers however tell me they didn't know the community existed, they don't know how to get involved or they are just too shy to step up. It is to this second group (and anyone who is already involved but wants more) that I want to talk to. If you want to get involved in the PHP community here are 5 quick ideas to get you going.

His five things are simple and cover a lot of different media, from blogs to twitter:

• Email your local PHP User Group and offer to speak.
• Setup a PHP tag on your blog.
• Submit something to DevZone!
• Re-tweet something about PHP.
• Find at least one other PHP developer that is not involved in the PHP community and convince them to read this list and take action.

He equates this last one to a "chain letter" but it's key to helping th community grow. It's all about people getting together around a language they love and sharing that with more and more people.

This was certainly not a scientific survey and there were only 16 responses, but it still offers some insight that can be useful in planning user group activities. Here are the top reasons...

The reasons included things like "learning from peers", "meet the experts" and "finding job opportunities". He graphed the results showing that learning from peers and networking came out on top.

For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework. The last two months of bug hunts collectively closed 63 issues. The May bug hunt saw new first-time winner Jan Pieper step up and take first. Then in June, Christian Albrecht (a previous bug hunt winner) took home first again. Congratulations Jan & Christian and thanks for making the bug hunt for May and June a success.

If you'd like to get involved, you'll need to have a CLA with Zend approved and ready to go. Then just show up on the #zftalk.dev channel on the Freenode IRC network and jump right in. There's also a guide to help you get started as well.

As reported last month, Zend Framework has started hosting a monthly "bug hunt": an effort to resolve issues against the framework. This month's bug hunt is today and tomorrow. The individual who helps resolve or assist in resolving the most issues during each month's bug hunt days will receive a Zend Framework t-shirt! Last month's winner was Padraic Brady.

Matthew includes a few reasons to help out - helping ZF helps you (and your projects), adding value to the framework and the development of good QA skills for creating unit tests and documentation. If you'd like more information on how to participate, check out this page of the Zend Framework wiki or just come over to Freenode's #zftalk.dev IRC channel and get involved!

The PHP community took this in stride because we understand that ASP.NET has its uses and there are situations where it is the better choice. I am proud of the PHP community because no one (as Joe supposed we would) raised the battle flag and flamed him, calling him a Microsoft shill.

He talks about how far the PHP community has come and why it's become as strong as it is - core developers involved in everyday things, respect for other community members and how there's "always a spot at the table" for any PHP developer to come and share stories or just enjoy those of others.

Cal also includes some good tips for getting involved in your local and the global communities (like blogging, IRC or contributing back to the PHP project).