In his new post to his site Zeev Suraski talks about the momentum growing behind PHP 7 and some of the recent articles about companies making the move and the overall impression of the new version.

We’re now a few months since PHP 7 came out, and if you’ve been following what’s going on in the PHP world, things are looking pretty exciting! [...] First, InfoWorld gave PHP 7 the 2016 Technology of the Year Award, which is quite remarkable. Remarkable is also how InfoWorld chose to describe the performance gains that are promised by PHP 7 – and I absolutely agree.

[...] As more and more people are trying PHP 7 out, we’re seeing more and more evidence that the promise of 2x performance is being realized, big time. Most recently, Badoo published an article detailing their experience migrating for PHP 5.6 to 7.0

He gets into a bit more detail about the numbers that Badoo published and gives a quick "thank you" to Dmitry Stogov for helping to spearhead the effort to get PHP 7 out the door from Zend. Finally, he points out that there's a Zend Server version that already runs on PHP 7 if you'd like to try it out.

As a part of this year's php|tek conference, the folks at php|architect once again put together their choices for the "Impact Awards", a special recognition for projects that have really made a mark over the last year in a few different categories.

As part of the grand finale of php|tek '11, Keith Casey announced the winners of the first annual php|architect Impact Awards. These awards are selected by the subscribers of php|architect magazine. They represent the projects that have had the most impact on the day-to-day lives of PHP developers. php|architect is proud to announce the winners of this year’s Impact Awards.

Winners this year included the Frapi (in Up & Coming), MySQL (in Data Management), Xdebug (in Integration/Development) and the Best Overall Product winner - the Zend Framework.

php|architect has announced a new effort they've launched to recognize the groups and projects in the PHP community that have had an impact. The Impact Awards is a yearly effort to recognize those contributions.

In short, we at php|architect recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. We build our site, our training and our magazine using tools created by developers who are giving freely of themselves. We want to recognize a few of those who have had an impact specifically on the PHP community. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of April to all php|architect subscribers. The winners will be announced at php|tek '11 in Chicago.

To vote, go over to the Impact Awards site and pick from their selections of people from categories like: the groups around various frameworks, integration/development, data management and up and coming projects. The winner will be presented with an actual award as designed by Toronto-based architect Alex Ilievski.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend Framework has won itself a BOSSie award (from InfoWorld) in the "best open source application development software" category. Matthew Weier O'Phinney has this to say about the award:

I am one of the privileged few to have worked with Zend Framework since before the original public pre-alpha release. [...] What [Mike Naberenzy] showed me at the time captured my imagination: the company with the best known name in the PHP industry was building an application framework, and the code I was seeing was simple, straight-forward PHP. It was the first time I'd seen a framework I was actually interested in using -- even if it was in its early, early infancy. I knew at that moment that I wanted to be involved in the project.

He mentions some of the things that "shook up" the development world when those first versions of the Zend Framework came out - like the PHP5 requirement and the CLA you had to sign to contribute.

Other BOSSie award winners include jQuery, Apache Hadoop, Git and Go.

Vance Lucas has an opinion on WordPress being named the best Open Source CMS by Packt Publishing recently.

My knee-jerk "how sad is that?" reaction comes not because I don’t think WordPress is worthy, but because of what it implies about the state of other open source CMS projects. The reaction comes from the fact that a blogging platform is kicking your CMS’s ass in its own category.

He points out that WordPress is, first and foremost, a blogging platform and that it has bridged the gap between blogging tool and CMS so well that it's winning in that category too.

The fact that I can go through literally hundreds of open source content management systems and still end up settling on WordPress because I know it’s the only one that won’t totally confuse my client is what’s sad. Usability and ease of use matter.

As mentioned on the symfony blog, the framework has been nominated as a finalist for the SourceForge Community Choice awards in three different categories:

• Best Project
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers
• Best Project for the Enterprise

If you'd like to help the framework (and the team behind it) win an award in this year's competition, head over and vote for them in each of the three categories.

SourceForge is holding their Community Choice Awards again this year and they've opened it up so that you can nominate your favorite project, PHP or not, to be considered for an award.

The awards program allows the community to recognize open source software projects that are built with the highest quality, creativity and ingenuity. [...] Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party, held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA, starting at 6:00 pm PT on the night of July 23rd, during the week of OSCON.

PHP-related nominations include the web2project web-based project management solution and the Symfony framework (in a few different categories).

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).

Stoyan has once again been tasked with helping Packt Publishing find the best open-source PHP CMS for 2008:

It's that time of the year again. Time to cast my vote as part of the jury in Packt's open-source awards, category "PHP CMS".

He includes some of the criteria he'll be using to judge based on including the list of features it includes, how quality is the code, what sort of state the documentation is in and how much of a community it has around it.

In a new post to his blog Andi Gutmans mentions how the Zend Framework was "well represented" in this year's SourceForge Awards.

The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento is a very popular eCommerce application that makes setting up an online shop quick and easy. It's well designed and has been nominates to several community spots like "Best Project for the Enterprise" and "Most Likely to Change the World".

Time 2.0 is focused on intranet collaboration and is a rewrite of the eGroupWare project (a collaboration suite allowing for instant access of any data from just about anywhere there's an internet connection).

You can cast your vote for these and other great community projects by logging in to SourceForge and selecting your favorites from the lists.