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 Lingohub site there's a new post showing how internationalization (i18n) is handled in 5 major PHP frameworks - CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend Framework Symfony and Yii.

As discussed in the previous articles on PHP internationalization, PHP provides native support for string translation using gettext and PHP arrays. These can be used in any PHP project. Additionally, some popular PHP frameworks offer their own way of string translation. In this article, I want to provide a brief summary of the internationalization process with five of the most popular PHP frameworks currently out there. In this How-To you will read about using CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, Yii and Symphony.

There's only a bit of sample code here, so it's not a complete tutorial for all of them. Mostly its links to more information about how each framework does things - modules used, formats and configurations.

On CoderWall.com there's a post sharing some findings about how RockThePost.com scaled PHP to 30,000 concurrent users on Amazon EC2 instances.

RockThePost.com is a LAMP stack hosted on Ec2. We're preparing to be featured in an email which will be sent to ~1M investors... all at the same time. For our 2 person engineering department, that meant we had to do a quick sanity check to see just how many people we can support concurrently.

They have a list of five suggestions/opinions on what has helped them scale out to this level including using Varnish for caching, turning on APC (PHP opcode caching) and using a c1.xlarge EC2 instance. They used Google Analytics and Siege to run their load testing on the "exterior" of the site.

If you've ever wanted to get involved in the open source world but didn't quite know where to start, Stefan Koopmanschap has a great guide posted to his blog with some tips on getting yourself out there.

Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.

He looks at things like finding the right project for you and some of the ways that you can give back to that project including:

• Core code/patches
• Plugins
• Documentation
• Promotion
• Deliver presentations
• Support

He expands out each topic mentioning more specifics on what that contribution type entails and even a few examples of projects on some of them.

Matthew Turland has a few things to say about web scraping (and recent articles covering it) on his blog today as an author of a previous article published in php|architect covering the same topic:

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless pointed a post out to me on the PHP DZone web site recently. Noting that the article's content was misinformed at best and downright ignorant at worst, even when examining it sheerly from the author's knowledge of PHP as a language, this friend asked that I set the author straight.

He mentions his comments on the post correcting the author on some points as well as a more "clued in" post on the xml.lt website talking about using PHP's DOM functionality instead.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial that walks through the complete steps of setting up a Fedora 8 linux server with a full LAMP stack complete with email, DNS, FTP and ISPConfig support. They call it the "Perfect Server".

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

It's a seven page process with plenty of screenshots and settings to help make the installation nice and easy.

On the HowTo Forge website, there's a new tutorial that walks through the complete steps of setting up a Fedora 8 linux server with a full LAMP stack complete with email, DNS, FTP and ISPConfig support. They call it the "Perfect Server".

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 8 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Fedora 8, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

It's a seven page process with plenty of screenshots and settings to help make the installation nice and easy.

Bill Staples has a new summary post on his IIS blog today covering some of the new things that IIS7 has to offer its community. Three of these pertain to PHP:

• A tutorial from Sabbir about installing PHP and MYSQL on an IIS server to get phpMyAdmin up and running (part one).
• A post from Drew Robbins about extensibility in PHP applications running on IIS.
• A how-to screencast on getting PHP and FastCGI working happily with IIS.

Bill Staples has a new summary post on his IIS blog today covering some of the new things that IIS7 has to offer its community. Three of these pertain to PHP:

• A tutorial from Sabbir about installing PHP and MYSQL on an IIS server to get phpMyAdmin up and running (part one).
• A post from Drew Robbins about extensibility in PHP applications running on IIS.
• A how-to screencast on getting PHP and FastCGI working happily with IIS.

The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial posted showing how to get the popular PHP-based content maagement system, Xoops installed and working on your Ubuntu linux machine.

I want to show you how to install Xoops on Ubuntu. I used the Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition, but it will probably work on other systems as well. Xoops is a modern Content-Management-System which can be extended with a variety of modules. Further information about Xoops can be read on the official Website.

The process is pretty simple, there's basically only four or five main steps to the process, but some have several substeps (like the Xoops install screens that take up a lot of step four).