On the Symfony project's blog they've made an announcement about the return of the Symfony Community Awards, a way for the Symfony community to recognize those that have really helped out the community or the project in the past year.

We're very pleased to announce the opening of the Symfony Awards votes! Every 2 years, we have the pleasure to organize the Symfony Awards to reward the Symfony Community members for their involvement in the great Symfony Community. The last Symfony Awards were organized at SymfonyCon Paris 2015, this year we're pleased to organize them at SymfonyCon Cluj 2017, November 16th-17th.

Categories include: Best Blogger, Best Code Contributor, Best Evangelist and Symfony MVP of the year. Anyone can be put in as a suggestion using either their SensioLabsConnect username or full name. If someone has won in the past and is selected again, the award will go to the next deserving person in line. Voting will remain open until midnight November 10th, Paris time.

In this new post to his blog Brian Swan shares the process that he and other Microsoft-ers went through to migrate a site off of a LAMP stack and over to one based on Windows Azure. They moved was the SAG awards website because of issues it had seen with outages and slow performance.

In many ways, the SAG Awards website was a perfect candidate for Windows Azure. The website has moderate traffic throughout most of the year, but has a sustained traffic spike shortly before, during, and after the awards show in January. [...] The main challenge that SAG Awards and Microsoft engineers faced in moving the SAG Awards website to Windows Azure was in architecting for a very high, sustained traffic spike while accommodating the need of SAG Awards administrators to frequently update media files during the awards show. Both intelligent use of Windows Azure Blob Storage and a custom module for invalidating cached pages when content was updated were key to delivering a positive user experience.

He walks you through each of the five steps (high-level, obviously) that they took in the migration:

• Export data
• Install Drupal on Windows
• Import data into SQL Azure
• Copy media files to Azure Blob Storage
• Package and Deploy Durpal

Each step comes with some explanation and descriptions of the commands and tools used during the process.

In this new post to the Symfony Blog, Fabien Potencier shares some of his thoughts about the Symfony community and tosses out an idea of a way to "gameify" the process to let community members proudly show off their level of involvement.

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, the voting state of the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards has officially started and you can cast your vote in one of many categories (and maybe win a prize for your efforts).

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.

From the O'Reilly ONLamp.com site today, there's a release about the SourceForge.net 2006 Community Choice Awards winners , and two PHP-based projects have made the list.

From March 15th through the 17th, users within Sourceforge.net were able to nominate projects. From these initial nominations, the finalists were chosen and these choices were made available to the community for voting. The finalists included a range of Open Source solutions ranging from CRM and firewall solutions to anti-virus and Xbox Media Center innovations.

Final voting was conducted March 17 – 23, 2006, and the project winners were selected by voting within 13 key technology categories, plus “Best Overall” project. Nominations and voting were managed by the third-party research firm, Wilson Research.

The PHP projects that made the cut were:

• phpMyAdmin in the "Database Project" and "SysAdmin Project" categories
• A PHP PayPal API in the "Financial Project" section

From the O'Reilly ONLamp.com site today, there's a release about the SourceForge.net 2006 Community Choice Awards winners , and two PHP-based projects have made the list.

From March 15th through the 17th, users within Sourceforge.net were able to nominate projects. From these initial nominations, the finalists were chosen and these choices were made available to the community for voting. The finalists included a range of Open Source solutions ranging from CRM and firewall solutions to anti-virus and Xbox Media Center innovations.

Final voting was conducted March 17 – 23, 2006, and the project winners were selected by voting within 13 key technology categories, plus “Best Overall” project. Nominations and voting were managed by the third-party research firm, Wilson Research.

The PHP projects that made the cut were:

• phpMyAdmin in the "Database Project" and "SysAdmin Project" categories
• A PHP PayPal API in the "Financial Project" section