Lukas Smith has written up the FAQ for the emPHPower movement and has posted about them on his blog:

Well unfortunately due to timing issues the emPHPower BoF at OSCON fell through. So it goes. In preparation for the BoF I have however taken the time to write down an FAQ. So the submission of the OSCON BoF was at least a kick in the butt for me to get this done. Please have a look and let me know if anything is unclear or unanswered.

The FAQ includes answers to lots of questions including:

• How to I get involved?
• What is the target audience?
• Will emPHPower compete with existing community efforts?
• What is the purpose of the membership fees?
• Why should companies not be allowed to sponsor emPHPower directly?
• Who decides on what emPHPower does?

On the Ibuildings blog today Mikko Koppanen talks a bit about Open Source software projects and things that can help to make them successful.

An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right?

He recommends a team infrastructure growth as the application grows and the importance of documentation and maintenance after the project has been launched.

As mentioned in This new post by Federico Cargnelutti on the PHP::Impact blog today, the BBC website is about to get a pretty radical make over - a move from Perl and static files out to a fully dynamic site made with PHP and Java.

Like most organizations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem, the BBC's is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. The good news is that they are planning to build a new infrastructure for bbc.co.uk and roll out a new Identity platform on it. This was announced on May during the XTech 2008 presentation that took place in Dublin, where BBC's plans to reinvigorate its technical platform were revealed.

The BBC wanted to upgrade their aging platform to something a bit newer and more flexible and wanted to be able to use things like the Zend Framework for the presentation layer and a MySQL backend to power the site.