On the Symfony Blog they've posted the official announcement of their Fourth Symfony Docs Hack Day happening on May 21st. This hack day is focused on just improving the documentation for the framework, not handling bugs in the main codebase itself.

The Symfony project is proud to announce its fourth Symfony Docs Hack Day. This Hack Day will be an online event to give a push to the Symfony Docs before the Symfony 3.1 release at the end of this month.

[...] Hosts Ryan Weaver, Wouter de Jong and Christian Flothmann along with you and all your friends from the Symfony community. The Hack Day is for everyone - we need Symfony experts and newcomers. If you're new to Symfony, you give us a fresh look at the documentation!

The post gives you a bit of an idea what the event will be like and what you can expect, especially as a first time submitter. It will be happening completely online via the "#symfony-docs" channel on the Freenode IRC network. You can prepare by following some of the links in the post to pending pull requests and a list of missing documentation contents.

On the Symfony blog they've officially announce their latest virtual Symfony Hack Day coming in March (on the 12th). This event is a concentrated effort from the project and developers to come together and solve issues over several hours.

Symfony has always been a project driven by a huge and active community. [...] Because Symfony has a predictable release schedule, we know that feature freeze for Symfony 3.1 will be at the end of this month (March). That makes the next few weeks of development really important!

That's why we've decided to organize an online hack day, and I would love if you'd join us. If you're an experienced contributor, great! If you're new, even better! This hack day will focus on teaching you how to contribute.

The event will be happening March 12th from 3pm to 8pm CET / 9am to 2pm EST and will focus around the #symfony-dev channel on the Freenode IRC network. They'll be focusing on how to get started contributing to the framework including a mini-workshop showing how to triage issues to creating a pull request.

On the Symfony blog there's a post from Ryan Weaver about an upcoming event the project is hosting and how you can help - the Symfony Docs Hack Day (on March 30th).

The first commit to the Symfony documentation was over 3 years ago, and since then, we've grown to include a full book, lots of cookbook entries, and sections for most of the individual components. [...] But as we grow, we want to stay aggressive and continue to improve the quality of the docs. This means ensuring that code examples are accurate and pages are easy to understand, balancing the info you need with excess technical clutter. [...] And this is where we need your help! Whether you're a seasoned-Symfony veteran, a beginner, or even if you don't think your English is very good, we'd like you to join us on March 30th for our first ever Symfony Docs Hack Day.

The event is a virtual one - everyone will meet up on the Freenode IRC network in the #symfony-docs channel on March 30th from 9am through 5pm Central EU time. Everyone's invited, not just those who are experts in the framework. Documentation updates are a great way to learn more about a framework too! If you're interested in what kind of updates they're looking for, check out this list of open issues with the docs on Github.

With the start of April 2009 also comes the beginning of this year's TestFest events. Zoe Slattery has posted about it:

So here we are at the beginning of the 2009 TestFest. There are currently 16 PHP user groups intending to participate, these are pretty widely distributed from Brazil, the USA and Europe.

The repository is open and available for the submissions the groups might make (more info here and here on testing procedures and how to submit the results) and you can always join the IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network - #phptestfest. You'll find plenty of help and conversation about writing tests and getting them where they need to go.

Kris Wallsmith has posted an announcement to the symfony blog about an upcoming event (happening Saturday November 8th from 3pm-9pm GMT) - Plugin Developers Day.

We will cover a number of plugin-related subjects in depth, including creating and naming a plugin, adding customizable model, form and action classes, unit and functional testing a plugin, packaging and releasing, and what's new in symfony 1.2.

If you've been meaning to try your hand at writing a symfony plugin or have been writing plugins for years, please join some of your fellow developers for a day of learning, collaboration and development.

Its an online event that'll be happening in the #symfony IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network. Nothing to sign up for - just show up ready to learn.

Christopher Jones reminds everyone out there that wasn't able to make it to the php|tek conference this year that there's several ways you can still feel a part of the action.

You can follow general conference happenings in various places: on Twitter, the #phptek channel on the Freenode IRC network, Planet-PHP and from the live feed.

You can also keep up with some of the twitter talk from those attending via the hashtags entry for "#phptek".

PotatoBob mentions a new resource for all of the Zend Framework developers out there, one more to add to their list of helpful locales - a Zend Framework IRC channel over on the FreeNode network.

So anyways a few of the folks over in http://zfforums.com decided there was a need for a Zend Framework irc channel, but there was no official one around so here it is the unofficial: #zftalk on irc.freenode.net

The group that set up the channel also has a website you can check out for the latest info on the channel and on the Framework itself - zftalk.com.

PotatoBob mentions a new resource for all of the Zend Framework developers out there, one more to add to their list of helpful locales - a Zend Framework IRC channel over on the FreeNode network.

So anyways a few of the folks over in http://zfforums.com decided there was a need for a Zend Framework irc channel, but there was no official one around so here it is the unofficial: #zftalk on irc.freenode.net

The group that set up the channel also has a website you can check out for the latest info on the channel and on the Framework itself - zftalk.com.

If you're a PHP-GTK developer and have heard anything about the PHPThrowdown event that sounds interesting, check out this new post on the PHP-GTK community site. They're looking for a few good coders.

After a few cups of tea the idea of putting several teams together so that we could have some competition within the ranks came about. Without any word on what the categories are for certain, there is still the Miscellaneous category. So either way by category or Miscellaneousness we can get some good stuff in and you will not have to see me cry.

If you'd like to help the cause and join the team, submit your information on their signup form and wait for further instructions. Should you or any of your team be captured...wait, wrong team. If you'd like to talk some with the other coders that you could be working with, though, check out their IRC channel over on the Freenode network - #php-gtk.

If you're a PHP-GTK developer and have heard anything about the PHPThrowdown event that sounds interesting, check out this new post on the PHP-GTK community site. They're looking for a few good coders.

After a few cups of tea the idea of putting several teams together so that we could have some competition within the ranks came about. Without any word on what the categories are for certain, there is still the Miscellaneous category. So either way by category or Miscellaneousness we can get some good stuff in and you will not have to see me cry.

If you'd like to help the cause and join the team, submit your information on their signup form and wait for further instructions. Should you or any of your team be captured...wait, wrong team. If you'd like to talk some with the other coders that you could be working with, though, check out their IRC channel over on the Freenode network - #php-gtk.