The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post full of links to some great add-ons for the popular WordPress blogging software to help make your site into more of a community.

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here's fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

Some of the packages they link to include Ajaxd WordPress, Profiles, Quick SMS, Invite Friends and SezWho.

The PHP::Impact blog has pointed out a new bit of software that can help you get your social networking application "up and running in minutes" - Symfonians.

Symfonians is an open source (CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed) project-centric social networking web application written in PHP5 and based on the Symfony framework (1.0 stable version is used). The code has been extracted from the Symfonians.net application.

Lots of features are included like an applications directory, a job offers catalog, weblog management, maps and geolocation and support for microformats. Check out the project's site for prerequisites and quick install information (via subversion).

The PHP London conference has officially released their schedule for this year's event. It includes speakers like Wez Furlong, Rob Allen and Derick Rethans and combines several different talks into one day of PHP goodness.

This year's event is happening at the headquarters of Inmarsat Limited (location and maps can be found on the venue page). Registration is now open and you can still get in on the Early Bird discount of £90.

Be sure to check out the list of talks they have planned and the rest of the details on their site and be sure to reserve your spot today!

In a note that I'm sure the Symfony project is happy to hear, James McGlinn shares the fact that del.icio.us has made the move to use the Symfony framework on their site:

The preview of the new version of hugely popular web 2.0 social bookmarking site del.icio.us has been available (to invited users) for a few weeks now. In the news this morning Yahoo! have confirmed that del.icio.us was rebuilt using the Symfony framework.

The official announcement mentions Yahoo's reasons for the move (including the great documentation and the active community) and their joy at having their framework being put into wide-spread, commercial use.

Stoyan Stefanov points out that the CMS nomination awards have now been opened for public voting (of which he is one of the judges of the PHP category). The event is put on by Packt Publishing:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Following on from the success of 2006, Packt has expanded the Award for 2007 with an increase in prize money and the addition of new categories.

There are five different categories this year:

• Overall Winner
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS
• Best Social Networking CMS

You can nominate your favorite CMS from the Packt site for each of the categories. The nominations only last until August 31st, so get in there and get your vote in!

In response to an earlier blog post from another member of the PHP community, Greg Beaver has posted a few thoughts he's had on sharing what's really going on with the PEAR project.

Newly elected PEAR Group member Josh Eichorn posted a blog entry, "How would you improve PEAR" recently. I was impressed with the response, it seems many people outside of PEAR are monitoring it and have thought about how to make it better. However, I was also not so impressed with the poor job we've done letting people know about the newest improvements to PEAR. In my comments, I listed as many as I could think of, but Josh pointed out that I would do well to post these comments in a more public setting, so here goes.

He notes that most of the items mentioned in the comments of Joshua's post are already implemented, save for one - CVS over Subversion. He also shares his renewed obligation of working on the social issues surrounding the project and the efforts that the project is doing to help current developers (stable works the same) and development (get involved! get active!).

Ryan Malesevich continues his series looking at some of the WordPress plugins he's foun duseful in his development work. This time he looks at a feature to make it easier for people to submit your post to the popular social networking sites of today (such as digg, furl, del.icio.us, etc) - WP-Notable.

What WP-Notable does is it allows you to include icons and links to where users can submit your site to the different websites, 15 of them to be exact. The 15 are: del.icio.us, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, yahoo, smarkling, magnolia, and segnalo.

I'll be honest, most of those I have never heard of, but it can't hurt to have those options to your visitors who have heard of them and are using it. To see an example of WP-Notable in work, just go to any article and underneath it you'll see the 15 icons with shortcuts to submit that article to those services.

The installation of the plugin is as simple as uploading and activiating, and Ryan includes a sample usage to integrate into your page.

On his blog, David Sklar has a very quick reminder about the upcoming Pro::PHP podcast that he's doing.

I'll be chatting with Marcus on the Pro:PHP Podcast this Friday, Feb. 24 at 1pm ET. Tune into the live webcast and ask questions!

As he mentioned, you can sign up for the free live webcast here or, if you can't be there, the entire recording will be posted on the Pro::PHP Podcast site (and can be pulled down by any aggregator subscribed to the XML feed).

A few months back, a brand new kind of service was introduced to the web - Ning. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks after, and everyone had high hopes for its future. So, why is Michael Arrington wondering about its demise?

What happened to Ning?

It was the perfect service at the perfect time.

The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features.

But the reality of Ning is that it's lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people's attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.

He shares what he sees as the problems with their setup (including the fact that you need to know PHP, or at least HTML to get anything done). Some of the reasons cite that they didn't promote it as well as they could have, and they've restricted it to their ning.com domain - not very practical for developers that want to use the system for their own sites/development/branding...