That Podcast, hosted by Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall, has posted their latest episode, Episode #6, talking about....well... Things.

Beau and Dave catch up on SensioLab's latest announcements, The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping your SaaS startup from scratch by yourself, Indie Hackers, and discuss convenient hosting for lots of small sites and apps.

Other topics mentioned include the Symfony Flex announcement, talking about side projects and Amazon Lightsail. You can listen to this latest post either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates on when new shows are released.

On the Symfony blog today Fabien Potencier talks about some small things that matter - some of the smaller updates that have been made to the Symfony 2 framework recently that have helped to make it better and more flexible.

Every new Symfony release tries to brings some small but useful improvements. Let's dive into some of them for Symfony 2.3 (in no particular order).

Things in his list include:

• A text-based output of the exception handling stack trace
• A default configuration for the Serializer component
• The ability to run the framework in a production environment in development
• An update to make debugging configuration parameters easier
• Conversion process of short controller names
• Overload generated code in the bundle bootstrapping code

Check out the post for the rest of the changes on his list and check out the RC1 of Symfony 2.3.0 to see some of them in action.

On the CohereCommunity.com blog has a (slightly older, but still good) post about communities and the "when" and "where" of them happening.

I’m talking about people trends and community and HOW. WE. CONNECT. I decided to start old school stylie, and looked up the word 'community' in the dictionary. [...] So community literally means to give gifts to and among each other. Which in turn means my community is a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.

They go on to talk about the three key elements any good community relies on - the people that make it up, the places they meet (real or virtual) and the "things" that bring them together.

If I could make a single plea to every researcher, academic, economist and reporter it would be to stop counting us and start communicating with us. Learn more about where, why, and how our communities form, and why they’re so important to us (even when they don’t make us any money).

If you're not already involved in a local user group or haven't attended a conference, it's an experience completely different than sitting behind the keys, hacking day to day. PHP.net has a list of both PHP conferences and upcoming events - find one near you and make plans to attend. You'll be glad you did!

Ever wanted to know more about the individuals in the PHP community around you? You're in luck! The "Seven Things" meme has been zipping its way through the PHP community with some great results. I've tried to get together a list of the posts made so far - it's not going to get them all, but its a start. Those linked in the top list are ones tagged and with a blog post. The normal list at the bottom are those that are tagged but haven't gotten around to writing their Things:

Tony Bibbs Keith Casey Matthew Turland Matthew Weier O'Phinney Davey Shafik Chris Cornutt Stefan Koopmanschap Ivo Jansch Elizabeth Smith Derick Rethans Michelangelo van Dam Padraic Brady Elizabeth Naramore Vidyut Luther Lars Strojny Ben Ramsey Brian DeShong Remi Woler Manuel Pichler Marco Tabini Cal Evans Jon Whitcraft Jeff Jones Greg Sherwood Chris Hartjes Andi Gutmans Roy Ganor Chuck Burgess Nili Gafni Jason Sweat Rafael Dohms Tobias Gies Wez Furlong Sara Golemon Brian Moon Jason Sweat Raj Shekhar

Lorna Mitchell Marcus Börger Johannes Schlüter Guilherme Blanco Eli White Timothy Boronczyk Paul Reinheimer Vidyut Luther Laura Thomson Patrick Allaert Maggie Nelson David Soria Parra Theo Schlossnagle Jani Hartikainen Paul Reinheimer Lars Jankowfsky Tobias Schlitt Mark Karpeles Jay Pipes Sebastian Nohn Brandon Savage Jan Lehnardt Christopher Jones Jakob Westhoff Lukas Smith Sean Coates Nils Langner Chris Shiflett Ligaya Turmelle Andrei Zmievski James McLean Zac Greant Christian Weiske Jan Kneschke Michael Kimsal Ken Guest Kae Verens Jamie Hemmett Christian Flickinger

And here's the slackers:

• Joe LeBlanc
• Ed Finkler
• Greg Beaver
• Bill Karwin
• Terry Chay
• Aaron Wormus
• Graham Christensen
• Nate Abele
• Max Horvath
• Johanna Cherry
• Beth Tucker
• Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Marc de Visser
• Joe Stagner
• Ralph Schindler
• Wil Sinclair
• Barry Austin
• FoxyDot
• Eric David
• Pierre-Alain Joye
• John Coggeshall
• Stas Malyshev
• Gaylord Aulke
• David Coallier
• Joe Stump
• Josh Eichorn
• Harry Fuecks
• Jeff Moore

If you're one of the ones that hasn't posted yet and you get around to it or if I've left someone's post out of the list, let me know and I'll update the list.

Fabien Potencier has a new post to the symfony framework's blog today talking about some more of the "little things" they've added to the latest version of the framework.

Symfony 1.2 already comes with a lot of great new features but smaller things also matter a lot. Here is yet another post about small things we have recently added to symfony 1.2.

The list includes the ability to generate a URL in an action using the routing object, new methods in the form object that make it simpler to use in templates and an update to the Phing/Propel interface to help with debugging.

Off of the Avatar Financial site, there's a great list they've created to share a few things they've learned around a popular PHP framework - more specifically 21 things they've learned about CakePHP.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting

and many more. There's lots of helpful tips here, especially if you're new to CakePHP and want that extra leg up.

Off of the Avatar Financial site, there's a great list they've created to share a few things they've learned around a popular PHP framework - more specifically 21 things they've learned about CakePHP.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting

and many more. There's lots of helpful tips here, especially if you're new to CakePHP and want that extra leg up.

On Marco Tabini's blog today, there's one of his traditionaly long posts dealing, this time, with "Five things you can do for PHP".

I often hear comments like "I wish I could contribute to PHP… but I really (don't have time|don't have the knowledge|am too shy|insert your favourite meaningless excuse here)".

Contributing to PHP is, I think, perhaps simpler than ordering a hot beverage* at Starbucks. It is, for sure, simpler than most people seem to think, and it requires no skills beyond being… a PHP developer (which is, of course, different from being a "developer of PHP").

If you don't believe me, consider this quick lists of things you can to help improve PHP today.

Items in the list include: "File a bug", "Learn more about what PHP has to offer", and "Celebrate those who work on PHP". He talks about these and the other two in the list in detail, giving more information on how you can get involved. You don't have to work on the PHP core to contribute to the project - all you need to do is have a will to help and a little bit of time...

On Marco Tabini's blog today, there's one of his traditionaly long posts dealing, this time, with "Five things you can do for PHP".

I often hear comments like "I wish I could contribute to PHP… but I really (don't have time|don't have the knowledge|am too shy|insert your favourite meaningless excuse here)".

Contributing to PHP is, I think, perhaps simpler than ordering a hot beverage* at Starbucks. It is, for sure, simpler than most people seem to think, and it requires no skills beyond being… a PHP developer (which is, of course, different from being a "developer of PHP").

If you don't believe me, consider this quick lists of things you can to help improve PHP today.

Items in the list include: "File a bug", "Learn more about what PHP has to offer", and "Celebrate those who work on PHP". He talks about these and the other two in the list in detail, giving more information on how you can get involved. You don't have to work on the PHP core to contribute to the project - all you need to do is have a will to help and a little bit of time...