On his site Colin O'Dell has a new post about a major milestone one of the packages he supports has crossed - the 1 million download mark. His post doesn't talk about how amazing the package, league/commonmark, is or even what it has to offer but about the process of getting there and the community support that made it possible.

This morning I came into work to find my Packagist download counter had rolled over: league/commonmark now has over 1,000,000 downloads!

To celebrate this milestone I thought I'd share the story of how this package came about, how it's grown, and how I couldn't have reached this milestone without the PHP community's help.

He talks about the initial creation of the package, its early days and how it was invited to become a part of the PHP League group of packages. He talks about improvements made to the package since then, including some integrations with other tools and projects. He then ends the post with thanks to the community for the support and their efforts to help make this package and all of them that make up the PHP ecosystem possible.

The Symfony blog has posted an announcement about the major milestone the project has reached - the framework has passed 500 million downloads since the original release of the first versions of Symfony 2.

We did it! On September 26th, we achieved a huge milestone: 500 million Symfony packages have been downloaded by the PHP community! Thank you to the countless developers, contributors, companies, conferences and users that have made this massive number a reality. The Symfony ecosystem now consists of over 70 packages, several of which are downloaded, on average, over 50 thousand times every day!

The rest of the post talks about the road that lead to 500 million downloads, the pervasiveness of Symfony components and the work they've done on the Backwards Compatibility Promise and Continuous Upgrade Path. The post also includes several pictures members of the Symfony community took as the counter approached the 500 million mark.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post about a major upcoming milestone for the framework: their 500 millionth download of version 2.0 of the framework.

Symfony 2.0 was released on July 28th, 2011. The biggest difference from Symfony 1.x was the internal architecture of the framework, which was designed around a set of stand-alone and decoupled PHP packages called Symfony Components.

In the five years since it's initial release the download count is getting closer to the 500 million mark all the time. They've even provided a real-time(ish) dashboard of the current count so you can keep track yourself if you'd like. The post also asks the Symfony users out there to share some of their own photos on Twitter of when the milestone is reached and even offers potential prizes to those that participate (a raffle).

So talk to your work mates, prepare a way to display symfony.com/500million in your office and share some photos of the moment so you get a chance to win. And while we wait for the moment ... keep downloading those Symfony packages!

Andi Gutmans has a note of celebration on his blog today - the book that he, Stig Bakken, and Derick Rethans worked on, "PHP 5 Power Programming", has officially passed one million downloads.

A few days ago I was informed that the PHP 5 Power Programming book has now been downloaded over 1 million times. Exposure no doubt. And considering that there are about 4.5 million developers out there, it's safe to say that probably between 1 in 5 PHP developers have actually laid their hands on it (or should I say their computer screens on it).

Andi mentions also being happy to see this milestone crossed for many reasons, one of which that it's a sign of the PHP community maturing. To grab your copy, check out this page on phptr.com.

Andi Gutmans has a note of celebration on his blog today - the book that he, Stig Bakken, and Derick Rethans worked on, "PHP 5 Power Programming", has officially passed one million downloads.

A few days ago I was informed that the PHP 5 Power Programming book has now been downloaded over 1 million times. Exposure no doubt. And considering that there are about 4.5 million developers out there, it's safe to say that probably between 1 in 5 PHP developers have actually laid their hands on it (or should I say their computer screens on it).

Andi mentions also being happy to see this milestone crossed for many reasons, one of which that it's a sign of the PHP community maturing. To grab your copy, check out this page on phptr.com.