The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, hosted by PHP community member Cal Evans, has posted their latest episode. In this new show Cal interviews the "dynamic duo" of Leanna Pelham and Ryan Weaver of KnpUniversity.

They talk about KnpUniverity, the training it offers and some of the recent happenings with the Symfony framework. They also talk about the process they follow to produce the training. There's also some mention of the PHP Detroit conference and Detroit itself.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by download the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when new shows are released.

The Sound of Symfony podcast is back today with their latest episodes and some special changes - Episode #9: The past and future of Symfony.

Sound of Symfony is back from its unplanned hiatus and launching a new format. We're also switching things up, and add two new co-hosts, Ryan Weaver and Jared Farrish.

This episode's topic is "How has Symfony kept up".

Topics mentioned in this episode include the NelmioApiDocBundle, the HATEOAS library from William Durand and a pull request for dynamic environment variables to Symfony. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the episode directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates as new episodes are released.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode today in their series of community member interviews. In this latest episode host Cal Evans talks with Ryan Weaver.

In this episode Cal and Ryan talk about the concept of "developer experience" (DX) and how the Symfony project has been working to make things easier. DX tries to make things that developers find consistently complex and simplify it. Ryan is hoping the concept will spread outside of the Symfony community into other groups.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 to listen to the show at your leisure. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

On the Acquia blog there's a recent post from Ryan Weaver from KnpLabs, well known for his contributions to the Symfony2 framework. In his post he suggests that the future of PHP is "shared power tools", less around the monolithic frameworks or installable software and more about the combinations of small pieces of code doing exactly what they need and nothing more.

[Things like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are] painstakingly thought about and solved the same problems from scratch. And despite that, the results were incredible. How? Because they leveraged the sheer size and passion of their respective PHP communities. But it makes me wonder: what crazy things could we build if we worked together? Fortunately, we're on our way to finding that out. The PHP world is transforming and the individual armies and empires are blurring together.

He talks about how PHP developers should stop fighting the same battles and start working together using existing libraries to solve problems. He points out that applications, even the big names, are becoming more and more modular. Even Drupal has recently made the move to include Symfony packages for some of its functionality (other examples are given too). He also talks about "developer experience" in using these tools, what Symfony is doing to help it and how building on these and other components is essentially "standing on the shoulders of giants" to solve problems easier, faster and with better quality code.

On the Symfony blog today they've officially announced the Symfony Best Practices initiative that's being ramped up to help provide a solid resource for Symfony developers and guide them towards more correct development within the framework (and its components).

Since the publication of Symfony 2.0, the Symfony Community has created an unofficial set of recommendations for developing Symfony2 applications. Unfortunately, a lot of these recommendations are in fact wrong. They unnecessarily overcomplicate things and don't follow the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony.

This guide, soon to be published at http://symfony.com/best-practices will share 31 of the best practices gathered by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz from their own experience and the practices the community has found along the way. The things in this guide will be optional, not required, to make Symfony-based applications work, so don't worry if you're not following them exactly.

The Sound of Symfony podcast has posted their latest episode today: Episode #3, "Developer experience. Join hosts Magnus Nordlander and Tobias Nyholm as they talk about the Symfony project's recent emphasis on the developer experience.

In this much belated episode we talk about developer experience and getting new coders into your open source project. The episode features not one, but two interviews. First up we have a short talk with Ryan Weaver about the DX initiative and the DX hack day, and afterwards we talk to Cathy Theys from Drupal about Drupal's mentoring efforts and how you can make your project more welcoming to new developers.

The episode includes the two interviews and mentions of several topics including the name of the next release of PHP and the announcement of the Symfony Live London 2014 speakers. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or you can download the audio file for offline listening. If you enjoy the episode, consider subscribing to their feed to get the latest episodes delivered as they're released.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has returned back to its usual interview format in this latest episode, an interview with Ryan Weaver an organizer of the Nashville PHP user group

Cal's "three questions" for Ryan about getting involved in local user groups:

• What advantage do you get out of the labor you put into the Nashville PHP user group?
• When you start looking for speakers, how do you find them?
• If you had to pick one piece of advice to give to other user group leaders, what would it be?

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.