Daniel Ribeiro has (re)published an article he originally wrote for the Web & PHP Magazine about becoming a PHP evangelist and helping to lead change in the community.

To evangelize is to effectively transfer information regarding one set of beliefs to another, with the final goal of converting each individual to the original belief. Isn't that what we do when we spread the word of PHP?! The idea behind being a PHP Evangelist is for an individual to speak passionately about PHP and be able to have strong and durable arguments for PHP, if questioned about his "faith" in the technology.

He talks some about the skills and things you'd need to become an evangelist - an advanced knowledge of the language, thinking "out of the box" about problems and how you can stand out from the other people in the community as a leader. He also recommends being technically adept as well and contributing to projects, either through support or actual development.

PHP evangelists are born to lead, to form opinions, influence the opinions of others and to have followers - and haters as well. Even if you think you were not born to be a leader or just don't want to be one, you will have to get used to public speaking if you wish to become a PHP evangelist.

In this recent post to his site, Rafael Dohms presents an interesting idea for leaders of groups to consider as a role for themselves (or people maybe wanting to move into something like that) - being an "enabler" instead of just a "leader".

This was discussed in our PHPSP UG and we tried to think of different structures to get past these issues, some ideas came and went but I also left and moved to Amsterdam. As it happens my community-drive did not stop and I started to feel that old itch, and ended up causing the start of AmsterdamPHP. [...] So we do not have leaders, we just have a group of enablers, people who want to help, or do, or have great ideas or contacts, and that seems to be a great title and description for what we are doing. It removes those misconceptions and it opens space for anyone to be an enabler, all the time, some of the time, whenever they want. It still gives credit where credit is due and it allows the people who deserve to help the group find a direction do exactly that.

He notes that by not trying to fill the traditional conceptions of a "leader" role and being more of the "guiding people" kind of person, you can sometimes do more to help others find their passion.

I have really come to love the title and all the "meaning" it holds, maybe it even takes the pressure off the usual labels and let's us focus on breaking down barriers.

According to this new post on his blog, Eli White has taken over the post of "community guy" at Zend (a post previously held by Cal Evans).

I've been offered a position at Zend, and accepted it. The official (lengthy) job title is Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief. The short form to many people would be: "The job formerly held by Cal Evans" I'm extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Zend and to have the focus of my daily job to be working with the PHP community which I dearly love. I know that any attempt to fill Cal's shoes will be met with failure, so I hope instead to come up with my own twist on the position and to give it my best.

He'll be acting as the liason between the PHP company and the rest of the community including writing articles, doing some podcasting and all around getting in the middle of whatever's going on in the PHP community. Congrats Eli!

According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.

After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.

Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.

Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.

In an effort to help out the Zend Framework project as much as possible, Zend has posted this job offering on the LinkedIn site for a "Software Team Leader" in the San Franscisco Bay area.

Zend is one of the major commercial drivers behind the success of PHP, and is investing in a number of open source projects aimed at further advancing the strength of the PHP technology and community. One of the most significant of these projects is the Zend Framework, which aims to make it very easy to develop the next generation of web applications.

Contributors to the project are some of the world's smartest programmers - some fulltime Zend employees, some working for sponsoring companies, yet others working as individual contributors. For this eclectic team we are looking to find a team leader who can bring out the best in each of the contributors, who can encourage even broader participation from the community, and who can keep it all together and deliver a coherent, state-of-the-art PHP framework.

Responsibilities of the position include:

• delivering a top quality PHP-based Web application framework
• lead a distributed team of highly qualified software engineers
• take part in actual development tasks and will be a role model for others

For complete infromation on this offering and to apply for the position, check out this job posting on LinkedIn.

According to this post on Freelancejob.com.au, the results of a statistical analysis of the job postings from getafreelancer.com show a huge surge of PHP jobs being posted.

According to statistical analysis of the 27750 freelance projects on getafreelancer.com site most wanted types of job are PHP (40% of all projects), Web Design (31%), Graphic Design (16%) and Flash (14%).

They provide both the table of the stats generated and a graph clearly showing that PHP jobs are head and shoulders above the rest.