Richard Thomas has added two more quick posts in his "Solar Shorts" series spotlighting the Solar framework:

• Solar Framework Shorts - Model to Form the quick way - An example of creating an auto-generated form based on a simple user model (with the controller and view code included).
• Solar Framework Shorts - Talk with the Solar Gods - A pointer to the IRC channel and discussion forums where you can interact directly with the development team and other Solar fans.

You can find out more about the framework itself on SolarPHP.com and more community information (and a project wiki) on the SolarPHP.org website.

The PHPWomen group has announced an new channel on the Freenode IRC network to compliment their already existing #phpwomen channel - and this one's just for the ladies.

Our existing channel #phpwomen remains open to all but we're adding a little space for the women to get together without the men if they want to. This channel has a password - pop in to #phpwomen on freenode, introduce yourself and request access details if you want to join in!

If you've never gotten in on IRC but want to find out more about it (and connecting to the Freenode network) check out the About section on the Freenode website. Come join in the discussion on both this new channel and on the current everyone's-invited #phpwomen channel!

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.

Robert Basic has put together an ever growing list of tutorials and other resources related to the Zend Framework (including several Twitter users to follow).

Besides the official documentation and the Quickstart, there are many useful resources for Zend Framework, like blogs and Twitter. I did my best to collect them. If you know something that's not listed here, but should be, please leave a comment and I'll update the post.

He has three categories right now - blogs of well-known developers of the framework and outspoken proponents of it, Twitter users you can follow that talk about/might help with issues that could come up and some of the books that have been published on the topic. There's also an "Other" category with mentions of IRC channels, the ZF wiki and the ZF forum.

As this new post on the symfony blog points out, their next Plugin Developers Day is happening this weekend on Saturday, November 8th.

Preparations for the coming plugin developers day on Nov. 8th are proceeding apace. I've heard from a number of you who are planning to attend, some planning to start development on new, groudbreaking plugins, others looking to help update existing plugins to work with the latest and greatest version of symfony, and still others just hoping to learn from the lively discussion. All types are welcome!

The event will be centered around the #symfony channel on the Freenode IRC network and is broken up into different sections - creating and releasing a plugin, writing a customizable plugin and coding sprints on new/existing plugins.

The PHP Women group has celebrated their second birthday this past Friday (October 24th) and have seen tons of progress of women in the PHP community during that time. This includes:

• Representation at conferences
• Continued success with our Big Sis Mentorship Program
• Growth in our IRC channel
• Formalizing our non-profit status
• Encouraging women to submit CfPs and to be published

So stop by wish them a happy birthday and see what they're all about!

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.

Chuck Burgess has a quick post pointing out the next "PEAR triage days":

PEAR's next Bug Triage days are this weekend: Saturday 4 PM - 9 PM UTC and Sunday 4 PM - 10 PM UTC.

You can find the schedule and more information about joining in at this page on the PEAR wiki. You can find others working on the triage on the EFNet's IRC network in the #pear-bugs channel.

Matthew Turland came across someone having an issue running his PHP-based IRC bot (Phergie) an an environment where the exec function wasn't allowed:

This causes a warning in the Quit plugin, which uses exec to automatically detection of the full path to the PHP CLI binary on non-Windows systems that it will later use that path to initiate a new PHP CLI process to "restart" the bot.

It check this setting for the future, it was recommended that he look at the SPL ReflectionFunction class (a part of the Standard PHP Library) that would let him check the disabled status of any PHP function (looking at the result of the isDisabled call).

Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).

The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.

In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.