Joe Ferguson recently attended the Laracon US conference, a conference centered around the Laravel framework and the community that's around it. In this post to his site he shares some of his thoughts about the event and something else that came up during the course of the event - the topic of "silos" in communities.

When the [JeoPHPardy] game was over I was thinking about a lot of the questions that the contestants couldn’t answer and how that relates to this being a Laravel conference. (As opposed to a PHP conference). [...] The point I’d like to make is that a random sampling of Laravel conference attendees were unable to answer medium to high difficulty PHP related questions. [...] I find it frustrating that a random sampling of Laracon attendees seem to be out of touch with not only notable PHP podcast hosts, the Framework Interoperability Group that is guiding the way they write code, and inner workings of the PHP language itself.

He goes on to share his frustration with the "silo" that it seems like the Laravel community has created, making their interactions with the general PHP community somewhat less. He points out that he's not picking on Laravel, though. He shifts the focus away from complaints about the community differences and instead emphasizes bringing people out of these silos. He includes a few practical things that can help too: attending a conference, going to a more general PHP user group, etc.

The GoPHP7 project has posted their initiative to try to improve the world of PHP for extensions and make them "first class citizens of the PHP community".

The goals of gophp7(ext) [are to]: get PHP extensions running “out of the box” when PHP7 is released (no lag time), make extensions in general easier to install and use (binaries, ppas), get more people involved in extension maintenance (and travis/appveyor running on them all, killing off bugs), get more documentation written for extension writing and codify some of the “best practices” of extension writing and design (a la PSR).

They're asking for help from anyone interested, even if you don't know C (what PHP extensions are written in). The project asks for just 30 minutes a day to help achieve their goals. The page also lists out the different ways you can help including cataloging the work that needs to be done on the catalog page and working on the development systems for PHP7 to make working with the extensions easier.

Lorna Mitchell has shares some interesting results of a recent survey asking people how they got involved in working with open source projects. The results were from a poll announced on Twitter.

I did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I'd loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed.

Not surprisingly, the largest group came from the "find a problem, submit a fix" category (40%) with the next in line being the group that open sourced their own code. The third category she mentions, coming in at 18% of the responses, was those seeking new skills either for personal growth or for their current (or next) job.

The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode, Episode #5: Side Projects hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost.

In this episode Matt and Jeff talk about how and why you should consider getting involved in side projects. Despite the jovial subtitle, “Getting a little side action,” participating in development outside of your normal development routine is beneficial to you as a developer as well as to your employer or clients. They further expand on the topic by talking about non-code-related side projects such as podcasts, discussion groups, or even writing.

They point out one application that's a good starting point if you're not sure where to get involved: the PHP Mentoring Mentor App. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you like what you hear, consider subscribe to their feed too.

In the latest in their series of PHP community interviews, the 7PHP.com talks with Jacques Woodcock one of the leaders in the Nashville PHP community and of the Nashville PHP User Group (see his previous interview for more on that). In this interview they focus on some quotes from Jacques posted on the SouthernAlpha startup Twitter account about giving back to the community.

The ‘level of wisdom’ in them was too strong to be left there, I had to bring it out and I’m thankful to Jacques ‘TheKit’ Guy for sharing with me (and hence you) his precious experience he gained down the years and elaborating more on those quotes.

They go through each of the quotes and let Jacques expand on them a bit - why he got started with the community, some ways that people can get involved in their local group and remembering that a community is made up of more than just single actors.

Stefan Koopmanschap recently posted a great new article about how you can get the most out of conferences and what they have to offer besides just the sessions.

At the most excellent PHPNW conference, Kat convinced me to deliver the first unconference talk of the day. It took me a while to get the right topic. I ended up with a topic I felt everyone at the conference could use for the rest of the two days that they were there: How to get the most out of a conference. For those that were not there, I want to try and put my unconference talk into a blogpost, so that everyone can use this information for their next conference.

He's broken it down into a few different major topics including the obvious "learn from the best" as well as:

• Learn and meet the best
• Find your new colleagues (or new friends)
• The backchannels
• Hack away! (at hackathons)

He also makes a great recommendation about providing feedback - not only is it important to the conference to let them know they've done a good job, but also to the speakers to help improve their skills.

On 7php.com today they've posted their latest interview with a well-known PHP community member - Lorna Mitchell:

In this edition I talked with Lorna Jane Mitchell, the Project Lead of Joind.in - built with PHP and proud to be Open-Source. She is the first female PHP programmer I’m interviewing on 7php.com and this makes it a special one. Lorna is a highly respected and highly looked-upon PHPer in the PHP Community with all her active contributions, writing so many insightful PHP articles, co-author of the famous PHP book “PHP Master|Write Cutting-Edge Code” and being a regular speaker at conferences – I was very lucky last week to have been able to attend her LIVE-online talk at Day Camp 4 Developers #4 (@daycamp4devs).

She answers some of the usual questions:

• How she got started with PHP
• Her top advice to PHP developers
• The best PHP book she's read
• What tools she uses for her development

Besides this, she also includes some words of encouragement to developers to get involved, not just in projects but in the PHP community.

In a new post to his blog Derick Rethans mirrors the call made by Rasmus Lerdorf at this year's PHP UK Conference - get involved (and help test PHP)!

At the PHP UK Conference Rasmus mentioned that he wants more people contributing to PHP. There are plenty of ways how you can do that.

Derick points out two more immediate ways you can help, one not even requiring any C knowledge:

• Help test the Release Candidates (like the current PHP 5.4.0 RC8) with a call to "make test" just after your compile.
• The recently added "random PHP bug" functionality that's been added to the bugs.php.net site

On 7php.com today there's a new interview with a well-known member of the PHP community - Cal Evans:

In this edition I talked with Cal Evans, the Icon Of The PHP Community. He is to the PHP Community what Pele is to the Football world, just to tell you about the influence he has on the PHP world. He shares, helps, mentors, propagates PHP wherever and as much as he cans. He was previously Chief editor of Zend Technologies (@Zend), worked for iBuildings (@ibuildings) one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe where he lead the growth of a PHP Center of Expertise and ex Mister ZendCon (@zendcon).

In the interview questions ask include topics like:

• How he started with PHP
• His thoughts on the good and bad parts of the language
• How he suggests getting involved in the PHP community
• The best PHP book he's read
• What tools he uses in his development
• A framework recommendation
• and how he defines "the PHP community"

On NetTuts.com today there a new article with what they think is the best way to learn PHP in a list of thirteen different "assignments".

Learning something from scratch is almost always an arduous affair — you simply have no idea as to where to start, or not to start, to kick things off. I loathed learning about the idiosyncrasies of C++’s syntax when all I wanted to learn were some darn programming concepts. As I’m sure you can agree, this is a less than ideal situation. [...] Today, we’re going to figure out the best way to learn PHP.

Among their list of "assignments" are things like:

• Disregard the Naysayers
• Read a Few, Good Books
• Create Something Simple
• Try out a Lean, Lightweight Framework
• Build Something Awesome
• Get Involved and Be Up to Date

There's also some good comments with suggestions of other frameworks to learn, things to try out and a few comments that put an emphasis on learning the language before diving directly into a framework.