Following along the theme of Elizabeth Naramore's post on open source involvement, Brandon Savage has posted some thoughts of his own (and reinforces hers) on encouraging developers to get involved and out contributing to some of their favorite projects.

Leaders of the open source community are always trying to encourage others to contribute. Volunteer contributors are always in short supply, and most open source projects are driven by volunteers, so recruitment is a big component of any open source project lead.

One of his main points to add to Elizabeth's list was that the architecture of the application matters. He gives an example of a project (the Phergie IRC bot) that is well-architected and makes adding in new plugins simple because of planning. He also shares a few other suggestions to help encourage open source participation like good documentation, good involvement from project leads and mentoring the "newbies" to help get the ball rolling.

Brandon Savage has written a sort of letter to those developers new to the PHP community and to the language to encourage them to not worry, that things will come in time.

Every day, new people join the PHP world, writing their first "hello world" script and moving on from there to connect to databases, build CRUDs, and otherwise explore the PHP language. If you’re one of them, you shouldn’t feel inadequate. No, learning PHP is a learning process. One of PHP’s strengths is that it is easy to learn, and that anyone can learn how to do it. Fewer can learn how to do it properly, but for those that do learn how to do it right, it can be a powerful language and a solid tool.

He reminds the developers that it's okay to ask for help when you need it (like on forums or IRC) and that reading things like blogs and the manual can help you more than anything else.

InfoWorld.com has asked a Buggles-inspired question about PHP and Java and how they influence each other's use - "Did PHP kill the Java radio star?"

Zend's CEO makes a claim that PHP is disrupting Java. Not only would I beg to differ, I think the use of Java and PHP (and other dynamic scripting languages) together is much more interesting to customers than an "either/or" discussion. [...] To argue that PHP is disrupting Java usage is, if you ask me, missing the point.

They suggest that PHP and Java really aren't in any kind of competition. Instead, they're separate tools that should be applied correctly when the need fits their skills. If anything, PHP has encouraged Java, especially with the creation of a Java-to-PHP bridge that lets them talk back and forth.

In a note submitted by the folks over at PHPClasses.org, there's details on a change in their book review section. It's no longer just limited to the reviewers the site picks out. Instead, anyone can submit a book review to the site on their choice of PHP book.

Writing books often does not pay enough to compensate the time and skill it takes. Many authors write one book and then move on working on paid consulting as it often pays much better. But writing good books also gets authors good reputation.

The general idea of this effort is to promote more good PHP books thus encouraging more authors out there to get up and get out and write their own quality resources.

In a note submitted by the folks over at PHPClasses.org, there's details on a change in their book review section. It's no longer just limited to the reviewers the site picks out. Instead, anyone can submit a book review to the site on their choice of PHP book.

Writing books often does not pay enough to compensate the time and skill it takes. Many authors write one book and then move on working on paid consulting as it often pays much better. But writing good books also gets authors good reputation.

The general idea of this effort is to promote more good PHP books thus encouraging more authors out there to get up and get out and write their own quality resources.