On the Symfony blog they've officially announce their latest virtual Symfony Hack Day coming in March (on the 12th). This event is a concentrated effort from the project and developers to come together and solve issues over several hours.

Symfony has always been a project driven by a huge and active community. [...] Because Symfony has a predictable release schedule, we know that feature freeze for Symfony 3.1 will be at the end of this month (March). That makes the next few weeks of development really important!

That's why we've decided to organize an online hack day, and I would love if you'd join us. If you're an experienced contributor, great! If you're new, even better! This hack day will focus on teaching you how to contribute.

The event will be happening March 12th from 3pm to 8pm CET / 9am to 2pm EST and will focus around the #symfony-dev channel on the Freenode IRC network. They'll be focusing on how to get started contributing to the framework including a mini-workshop showing how to triage issues to creating a pull request.

If you weren't able to make it to the PHP Community Conference last year, there's good news - the conference is returning next year in March 2013!

In 2011, we had our first ever conference. Our sponsors, speakers, and attendees were phenomenal. You rocked so much that we want to do it again! Mark your calendars for March 2013. This friendly, little PHP conference is returning to Nashville, TN.

To get the latest on this great conference, you can follow their account on Twitter and get news as it comes out. If you want to see what the previous conference was like, you can check out the site from 2011.

On the PEAR blog there's a recent post looking at the month of March so far and some of the PEAR-related happenings that have already popped up.

After a quiet holiday season, the PEAR community has started rumbling again. [...] If this level of activity is anything to judge by, the future of PEAR looks bright for 2010!

Updates this month include a mention of the PEAR project on digg.com, the release of several new package versions for things like Facebook and the Mail package. They've also set up a continuous integration environment to help make the maintenance and testing of the code in the new releases simpler. There's also mentions of Phirum and PEARFarm and how they're lowering the barrier for PEAR installation everywhere.

Daniel Cousineau has written up some timely advice in a new post to his blog. It looks at pinpointing the time boundary for Daylight Savings Time in a PHP script (when it starts and when it ends).

I had an issue recently where I needed to calculate the Unix timestamp for the daylight savings time boundaries. According to the United States Naval Observatory, daylight savings time begins the Second Sunday of March and ends on the First Sunday of November.

He looks at using the strtotime function to calculate these dates but points out some quirks - like what happens when you just give it a month or something like "second Sunday". His solution was to go back one day ("March 0" instead of "March 1") and calculating the time from there, including that first full day of March in the calculation.

The C7Y Podcast (formerly the ProPHP Podcast) has released their latest episode - the newscast for March 20th, 2008. Here's some of the things that Sean and Paul talk about in this show:

• the Google Summer of Code
• the upcoming PHP 5.3 release
• Building PHP on Windows
• the release of version 1.5 of the Zend Framework

...and much more! You can get this latest episode in two different ways - either download the mp3 directly or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and other great episodes packed with news from all around the PHP community.

The Pro::PHP Podcast (from php|architect) has posted its latest episode - their newscast for March 6th, 2008.

Back on track, mostly. We had to use the crappy internal mic on my laptop, but it's better than shouting to the next town over... right?

There's lots of different topics covered this time including the infamous CLA, Traits, Late Static Bindings, PHP on Windows, Drupal 6 and much more. You can either grab the show directly from the page or you can subscribe to their feed to get this and future episodes.

Stefan Esser has a post to the PHP Security Blog about his "Month of PHP Bugs" (March 2007) that will be happening and some of the new effects that the recent release of PHP 5.2.1 has had on it.

Today PHP 5.2.1 was released which fixes some (but not all) of the bugs I will cover in the "Month of PHP bugs". Actually the release announcement already gives a list of bugs that were fixed.

He also comments on the reporting of the bugs in the Changelog and updates in the release announcements and how they're handled.

Stefan Esser has a post to the PHP Security Blog about his "Month of PHP Bugs" (March 2007) that will be happening and some of the new effects that the recent release of PHP 5.2.1 has had on it.

Today PHP 5.2.1 was released which fixes some (but not all) of the bugs I will cover in the "Month of PHP bugs". Actually the release announcement already gives a list of bugs that were fixed.

He also comments on the reporting of the bugs in the Changelog and updates in the release announcements and how they're handled.

Codewalkers.com has information posted about the release of the latest issue of (IN)Secure magazine, a free digital security magazine published in PDF format.

This latest issue [PDF] covers all sorts of topics, including an article focused on PHP and SQL security today by Andrew Benniestan.

Some of the other topics covered in this month's issue cover:

• Best practices in enterprise database protection
• Security for websites - breaking sessions to hack into a machine
• Apache security: Denial of Service attacks

You can grab this latest edition from their site or go to this direct link [PDF]

Codewalkers.com has information posted about the release of the latest issue of (IN)Secure magazine, a free digital security magazine published in PDF format.

This latest issue [PDF] covers all sorts of topics, including an article focused on PHP and SQL security today by Andrew Benniestan.

Some of the other topics covered in this month's issue cover:

• Best practices in enterprise database protection
• Security for websites - breaking sessions to hack into a machine
• Apache security: Denial of Service attacks

You can grab this latest edition from their site or go to this direct link [PDF]