I'm talking about people trends and community and HOW. WE. CONNECT. I decided to start old school stylie, and looked up the word 'community' in the dictionary. [...] So community literally means to give gifts to and among each other. Which in turn means my community is a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.

They go on to talk about the three key elements any good community relies on - the people that make it up, the places they meet (real or virtual) and the "things" that bring them together.

If I could make a single plea to every researcher, academic, economist and reporter it would be to stop counting us and start communicating with us. Learn more about where, why, and how our communities form, and why they're so important to us (even when they don't make us any money).

If you're not already involved in a local user group or haven't attended a conference, it's an experience completely different than sitting behind the keys, hacking day to day. PHP.net has a list of both PHP conferences and upcoming events - find one near you and make plans to attend. You'll be glad you did!

And here's the slackers:

• Joe LeBlanc
• Ed Finkler
• Greg Beaver
• Bill Karwin
• Terry Chay
• Aaron Wormus
• Graham Christensen
• Nate Abele
• Max Horvath
• Johanna Cherry
• Beth Tucker
• Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Marc de Visser
• Joe Stagner
• Ralph Schindler
• Wil Sinclair
• Barry Austin
• FoxyDot
• Eric David
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• John Coggeshall
• Stas Malyshev
• Gaylord Aulke
• David Coallier
• Joe Stump
• Josh Eichorn
• Harry Fuecks
• Jeff Moore

If you're one of the ones that hasn't posted yet and you get around to it or if I've left someone's post out of the list, let me know and I'll update the list.

Symfony 1.2 already comes with a lot of great new features but smaller things also matter a lot. Here is yet another post about small things we have recently added to symfony 1.2.

The list includes the ability to generate a URL in an action using the routing object, new methods in the form object that make it simpler to use in templates and an update to the Phing/Propel interface to help with debugging.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting

I often hear comments like "I wish I could contribute to PHP… but I really (don't have time|don't have the knowledge|am too shy|insert your favourite meaningless excuse here)".

Contributing to PHP is, I think, perhaps simpler than ordering a hot beverage* at Starbucks. It is, for sure, simpler than most people seem to think, and it requires no skills beyond being… a PHP developer (which is, of course, different from being a "developer of PHP").

If you don't believe me, consider this quick lists of things you can to help improve PHP today.

Items in the list include: "File a bug", "Learn more about what PHP has to offer", and "Celebrate those who work on PHP". He talks about these and the other two in the list in detail, giving more information on how you can get involved. You don't have to work on the PHP core to contribute to the project - all you need to do is have a will to help and a little bit of time...]]> Thu, 17 Nov 2005 05:33:41 -0600