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.

The Laravel project has traditionally held discussions about the internals of the framework in an IRC channel on the Freenode.net network. The decision was made recently, however, to move the development over to GitHub (most likely to make it more accessible).

There's already several issues that have been posted on the Issues list in the GitHub repository including things around:

• improving typecasting
• decoupling Carbon (the date handling library)
• a fluent interface for validation
• enhancing the localization functionality

You can give feedback or start your own discussions by adding an issue to the list or just sharing your thoughts on current topics.

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.

Cees-Jan Kiewiet has posted a tutorial to his site showing how to connect Phergie to Slack through a custom gateway. Phergie is a popular PHP open source IRC bot project in use in several channels on the Freenode.net IRC network.

Ever since the rise of Slack and the Phergie v3 connecting them has been on my to do list. And while Slack API is the better alternative this was fun nontheless.

He walks you through some of the prerequisites for the setup including a working installation of the Phergie bot (installations instructions not included). From there he helps you make the custom Gateway and make a user for the bot to operate under. He then includes the settings and configuration you'll need to configure on the bot to allow it to join the Slack instance.

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.

The /Dev/Hell podcast has posted the latest episode of their podcast (as hosted by Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) - Episode #29, "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions".

Being totally out of ideas, we turned things over to our legions of fans who joined us on IRC. Lots of interesting questions, and people learned what Ed thought was horseshit.

As you can imagine, there's lots of topics covered including some discussion of PHP IDEs, if PHP has reached its limit and liberal versus conservative programmers. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

On CodeIgniter.com there's a new post updating the community on more of the current happenings surrounding the project including the status of their move to github and another source for developers to find the CI help they need.

In less than two weeks since the announcement was made at CICON that CodeIgniter was moving to GitHub, we’ve seen some incredible results from the change. Already CodeIgniter is the 10th most watched PHP project at GitHub (currently 758), with 42 open pull requests, 53 merged pull requests, 170 forks, and 41 individual contributors. Incredible!

[...] We also noticed what seemed to be a spike in activity on the #CodeIgniter Freenode IRC channel, so we’ve decided to make it more prominent to encourage its continued use. You’ll now notice an IRC tab in the main navigation, letting you access the #CodeIgniter IRC channel right here at CodeIgniter.com.

If you want more details on why they made the switch over to git, check out this blog entry from the EllisLab site for an explanation from Derek Jones

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.