In a new post Brandon Savage suggests that, because of the openness of the PHP community and the hard work that's put into the language every day, those who aren't giving what they can back to the community might be "stealing" (in a sort of spirit of mutual giving kind of way).

That may sound harsh but consider: people who write open source software generally aren't paid to do it. There are a few exceptions (some people are paid to write Wordpress or the Zend Framework, for example). But the core of PHP is contributed by people who are solely interested in making PHP better for their professional endeavors. Not contributing to their efforts is like showing up at a potluck without bringing a dish. Not cool.

He also suggests a few ways that you can give back to the project and to the community like contributing to the documentation project, submitting a bug report, writing patches, etc.

The community exists because people choose to contribute. Giving back isn't a matter of charity, but a matter of the survival of the product or project you use every single day. It's not really optional, but it is easy.

On the Blue Parabola blog Keith Casey has posed a question about the motivations for working on an Open Source project - "Why help/contribute to a project? What's your motivation?"

It's a very good question and the answer should sound familiar to quite a few people...despite working on some fun and amazing projects, I had nothing to show for it because all were proprietary and some were even classified. As far as my professional career went, I had nothing to show for it. I had some stellar references and could talk (in vauge terms) about some things but I had zero code.

To fix things, he set about to build his missing portfolio of "show it to anyone" code that he could hand to a potential employer to show the quality of his work. This produced a nice side effect too - an influence for the better on his "real work" at his job (see this article for more info on that effect).

Philip Olson has a few recommendations for the PHP project and community on how they can get more people involved in the different areas of involvement whether it be in two area he mentions specifically - development or working with documentation.

Unlike PHP.net, Ubuntu.com prominently displays "Get Involved" on their main site. This area clearly breaks up into different categories like Bugs, Brainstorming, Design (UI), Support, Localization, Testing, and the two I'll focus on: Development and Documentation.

For each of the subheads he outlines a resource that could help to develop that area and gives examples of each from the Ubuntu site - documentation, development. He's also looking at ways he can help change the current state of the "marketing" on the PHP.net site with a series of Open Source guides (on open source topics and open source themselves) to help bridge some of this wide open gap between developers and PHP.

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone today, the group working on the Eclipse PDT extension has been working hard to get the tool ready for PHP 5.3 when its released and are now looking to the community to help them with some testing.

Roy Ganor explains in his blog:

Since Michael has just finished implementing the second phase for PHP 5.3 support in PDT, we can now expose unit tests and ask users to add more cases to the code assist tests repository.

His post includes the basic format for the tests (as written in pdtt, a clone of the phpt format) and a clip from the PDT wiki page about why they need them. There's no automatic way to submit them but if you want more information on the project and testing, you can always send them an email to find out more.

Amit Singh dropped me a note to let me know about a new community site he's developed to share PHP-related resources from all around the web (similar to DZone) called PHPCamp.net.

PHPcamp aims to provide a platform where everyone can bring interesting links, news and share their knowledge that are helpful to other web developers. It provides publishers with a chance to easily show their articles to others and gain some readers; most importantly it provides readers an easy way to keep an eye on latest things in PHP world, at the same time, giving them a chance to learn new things every day.

The site takes in user-submitted articles/blog posts/etc and they're dropped into the "freshly arrived" list for public consumption. If a link gets enough attention, its listed under the "getting hotter" and "boiling" sections progressively. Check out their blog for more information.

Andi Gutmans has pointed out an effort that Adobe has proposed that would go a long way towards adding AMF support to the Zend Framework.

This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side. Leading the design of the component for Adobe is Wade Arnold. Wade already has a track record of bringing the Adobe RIA technologies to PHP as a result of all of his work on AMFPHP.

Andi sees this as a next logical step to helping the framework become more "Enterprise oriented" and to compliment the recent Dojo integration. The plan is to release it with the 1.7 version of the framework, but the actual timing may vary due to the approval process.

Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has posted an update on the status of the Zend Framework for the month of May:

This [May 15th maintenance release] reinforces our commitment to high quality and we will continue to release periodic mini releases on an as needed basis. [...] Not only is the Zend Framework user base growing rapidly but we are also seeing a sharp rise in adoption of ZF in business-critical commercial applications.

He mentions several major sites moving to use the framework like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IGN Entertainment as well as the update they've made to the contribution process to allow for easier submission and review.

Vidyut Luther has started up a new service that aims to help answer the question "what sites out there are running on PHP?" - PHP Powered:

Welcome to PHP Powered. The point of the site is simple. We want to create a comprehensive list of sites that use PHP. The list of sites here is contributed and updated by you, the users/visitors. To add a site, you must have a valid account with the site. Create an account, respond to the verification email, and proceed to add your site.

The site allows developers/users/anyone really to signup and add the sites they know are running on PHP to share with the world. You can also check out the listing page that lets you search and sort by the type of site, the PHP version that it's running, and the operating system it runs on.

A note about a new framework that's been release was passed along to us today - the WebMesh framework PHP5.

WebMesh is a framework developed to serve of base for the creation of projects with PHP5. It offer an API with various abstractions to facilitate the application development and a module implementing the MVC pattern (Model2) using Smarty in the View.

Some of the goals for the framework include:

• Force a better organization of the your project classes
• Encorage the usage of the PHP version 5
• Becomes it a collaborative framework where others can contribute with new classes, abstrations, libraries, modules or frameworks to be integrated

Tobias Schlitt, on the heels of the "PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast" posting on Ohloh has helped Sebastian Bergmann get the eZ components project entered into their database for some tracking with some interesting results.

eZ components consists of 171,025 lines of code (including markup and code itself). If you subtract the XML, eZ components consist of 96,424 lines of pure PHP code (no docs included, if I got it correcltly), which is rather much in my eyes.

He gives other stats for the component framework including a price estimate for manhours put into the project and how much, on a per-developer basis, has been contributed to each (including things like a code to documentation ratio and total lines of code contributed).