On the Symfony blog they've posted an update about recent advancements in their diversity initiative. They share a few different updates, resources and changes that have been made to help improve the overall diversity of the community around this popular framework.

Updates included in the post cover:

• Respectful Review Comments (a guide on writing them)
• Mentorship program
• Code of conduct and enforcement process
• Context and Slack discussions
• New slack channels

The post ends with a few "final words" from Lukas Kahwe Smith about another initiative that's been started to help improve the representation from specific groups in the Symfony community and ecosystem.

On the Symfony blog the project has posted an announcement about a new effort to help make the Symfony community even better - the Diversity Initiative.

I like to say that docs are more important than code in a tech project. Docs are a challenge for any project as developers like to write code, not docs. But the real success of a project is best measured by its community: the people working on/with the project. Without people, code is nothing.

[...] What's the biggest challenge for Symfony as a community? Diversity. Through the years, we've made some baby steps. [...] But we can do better. Much better. That's not enough.

The post talks about some of the efforts that have been made so far to help increase the diversity of the members of the Symfony community and ensure everyone has a voice. In an effort to help drive a larger adoption of the ideals and processes around the effort, they've named Lukas Kahwe Smith as a community leader for the diversity initiative and a mention of some of the work he's already doing to improve things.

In a new post to DZone.com today Mitchell Pronschinske responds to some comments that were made by Lukas Smith about working with interfaces in PHP and what he sees as an ideal "drop in" solution.

The PHP community was reacting to Lukas Smith's "Interfacing the PHP world" for most of last weekend. [...] It's a pretty major propositon to start 'interfacing the PHP' world. Catch up on the conversation and let us know what you think.

Mitchell summarizes Lukas' thoughts into three points - interfaces in separate repositories, PHP frameworks not adopting 5.3 yet and the customization of method names/naming conventions across frameworks and tools. Another response to Lukas came from Herman Radtke with Lukas following up his original post with "Why Bother?"

This new post to the PHPClasses.org blog take a look at some of the new features that will be included in the PHP 5.3 release (coming soon to a web server near you!) by way of an interview with Lukas Smith.

his article presents an interview with core PHP developer Lukas Kahwe Smith that has pushed many of the new features of PHP 5.3 as release manager. Lukas talks about PHP 5.3 new features such as lambda functions, closures and PHAR support. He also explains what are traits, which for now it is a feature that was left out of PHP 5.3. He also talks about future PHP 5.x and PHP 6, as well how anybody can help in the development of PHP to make it come out faster.

They talk about the PHP.net wiki, briefly touch on the PHP 5.3 feature updates, performance/memory usage in the new version, Lambda functions, closures and PHAR and what's to come with PHP 6.

Lukas Smith has posted the second and third parts of his talk with Rasmus Lerdorf - a look at MaxClients and HTTP headers.

As promised here are the two other logs from the recent chat I witnessed. [...] Again I left the logs in their raw original way. Hope they are useful for you all.

Lukas also links to two resources he mentions in the second (third?) log about performance as well as mentioning one of the most useful Firefox extensions for web developers - YSlow!.

Both Lukas Smith and Michael Kimsal are talking about a new project started up by the PHP development group to help provide more information to the users (and other developers) of the PHP language - the PHP.net wiki.

Michael comments:

This has been a long time coming and I'm glad to see it in place. I hope it will continue to help open up the development process to a larger audience. [...] This is definitely a large step for the project and I hope it'll get traction and become one of the key tools used to drive PHP forward.

And Lukas talks more about the planning behind the project:

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. [...] I am quite happy that we managed to get this far.

You can check out the wiki yourself at wiki.php.net.