On the Symfony project's blog they've made an announcement about the return of the Symfony Community Awards, a way for the Symfony community to recognize those that have really helped out the community or the project in the past year.

We're very pleased to announce the opening of the Symfony Awards votes! Every 2 years, we have the pleasure to organize the Symfony Awards to reward the Symfony Community members for their involvement in the great Symfony Community. The last Symfony Awards were organized at SymfonyCon Paris 2015, this year we're pleased to organize them at SymfonyCon Cluj 2017, November 16th-17th.

Categories include: Best Blogger, Best Code Contributor, Best Evangelist and Symfony MVP of the year. Anyone can be put in as a suggestion using either their SensioLabsConnect username or full name. If someone has won in the past and is selected again, the award will go to the next deserving person in line. Voting will remain open until midnight November 10th, Paris time.

The voting phase for the PSR-7 proposal (HTTP messaging structure) has been cancelled due to the desire to improve and clarify the spec before approving it.

Since we put PSR-7 up for a vote, a number of issues have arisen that we feel require attention. In most cases these are clarifications that, had they been made during REVIEW, could have been merged without dropping the spec back to DRAFT. Sadly, since PSR-7 is now up for a vote, we cannot make clarifications to the spec. We cannot even make clarifications after the spec is accepted, either, except by way of annotations and errata in the meta document.

We've weighed the risk of leaving the spec as-is against canceling the vote and making the required changes directly to the spec itself. This has been an ongoing discussion since the middle of last week. I had a meeting with Mathew and Paul this morning in which we decided that it would be in the best interest of everyone for us to cancel the vote and make the changes directly.

The call was a tough one, but the discussions around the proposal have worked out a lot of the kinks, just not all of them. As is mentioned in the Google Groups post, the PSR will go back up for a vote in two weeks. PSR-7 outlines a standardized interface for working with HTTP requests and responses, providing interoperability between frameworks and tools at this basic level.

There's been an RFC that's recently made it through the voting process and was approved for inclusion in PHP6, the uniform variable syntax handling. When these changes are put into effect, some of the odd syntax you had to use for things like variable variables will be cleared up and standardized. However, Derick Rethans stood out as the only "no" vote, here's why...

As you might have heard, PHP developers voted on an RFC called "Uniform Variable Syntax". This RFC "proposes the introduction of an internally consistent and complete variable syntax". In general, this RFC argues for making PHP's parser more complete for all sorts of variable dereferences. [...] Thirty people voted for, and one against: Me. Does that mean that I am against a unified variable syntax? No, I am not. I am actually quite a fan of having a consistent language, but we need to be careful when this hits existing users.

He points out that there's known backwards compatibility breaks in the changes and this breaks the semantics of the language. While the BC breaks are understood, Derick suggests that this is one of the worst changes a language can make: "...and this is exactly why people whine that PHP breaks BC and does not care about its users".

As Paul Jones mentions in his latest post, one of the latest proposals to the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) has officially passed, PSR-4, providing a more strict standard for autoloading than the widely used PSR-0.

Counting from the date of that first formal proposal, it has taken exactly 8 months of discussions, one botched vote, one rescinded vote, an entirely new FIG workflow, and four or five rewrites to get PSR-4 passed. Maybe 8 months doesn’t sound so long when you look back on it, but while you’re in the middle of it, it’s interminable.

Paul talks about some of the differences between it and PSR-0, making for "shallower" and more concise directory structures for packages. He also points to some of the packages from the Aura framework as examples of its implementation.

As is mentioned in this Reddit post, the PHP-FIG group has moved a new autoloader structure proposal into "Draft" status, making it past the initial proposal (Entrance Vote) level as PSR-4.

This new autoloader has been in the works for a while, and is meant to be a modern autoloader that reflects the changes in the PHP landscape since PSR-0 was originally put together. Yesterday it passed the Entrance Vote, which means its now a formally worked and supported by the FIG.

While PSR-0 is new to many, its been around for years - since before Composer was really a thing - and PEAR/SF1/ZF1 were the prominent sources of distributed code. Now that so many are building components with Composer and using PSR-0 (yay) it's about time a new standard took care of a few hangovers from the PEAR/Zend style.

The newly proposed autoloader gets rid of some of the allowances that PSR-0 included like proper namespace support (no more underscores) and a reduction in the required folder structure to make it work. The Composer project is also a part of these discussions and are on board with making these proposed changes in the project's autoload handling.

We'd love to get constructive feedback on PSR-4. Post stuff up here, on the mailing list, get in #phpfig on freenode, whatever, just get involved. That doesn't mean everything will be implemented, but there is more chance of the standard containing your feedback if you make it - so post something.

The Web and PHP Conference has officially started their voting process for the sessions in their upcoming conference:

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen... let the battle commence! For this year's Web & PHP Conference in San Jose, Sep 16-18, we want YOU to get involved and have your say in the program. We've reserved six places in the schedule to be picked by the community, decided by an online vote. Each week, we'll be putting up a group of four abstracts and asking you to vote on your favourite.

This is the first week and they pit four sessions/speakers against each other:

• Using Zend Framework components to write WordPress plugins - Brad Griffith
• Ten Things You Can Do To Make Your MySQL Databases Happier and Healthier - Dave Stokes
• Getting Good with the AWS SDK for PHP - Jeremy Lindblom
• From 'Mission Impossible' to 'Mission accomplished' - Yann Larrivee

You can cast your vote here. The current round will end on July 10 at 11pm PDT.

As mentioned in this new post from the php|architect site, the voting for their 2012 Impact Awards has begun!

We at php|architect want to honor those who give of themselves so that we can work with PHP and in this great ecosystem. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and want to pause to say thank you. The full details can be found on the Impact Awards page. Voting is open through the end of March and is open to all php|architect subscribers.

The categories for this year's event are "Up & Coming", "Best Cloud Platform" and "Best PHP Application Platform". Nominees across all of the categories include Joind.in, PintLabs, AppFog, Pagoda Box Drupal 7 and SugarCRM. If you're a subscriber, get in there and vote for your favorites!

In this post to DZone.com today, John Esposito points out a site that compares popular PHP frameworks socially, a collaborative resource to keep track of things like framework features, popularity and their last update.

There's this wiki-ish comparison of PHP frameworks from socialcompare.com -- presently incomplete, but already containing quite a few frameworks and interesting details of each. You can add comparison criteria (rows; folksonomically) or update existing criteria -- which currently include, among other details, ORM specifics, cache storage, template system, and testing libraries.

Frameworks currently covered include Zend Framework, CakePHP, Fat-Free, Symfony, Yii and Kohana. As it stands now, Yii is the most popular framework with 8 votes and Symfony and Zend Framework are tied for second with 5 points each.

In this new post to the Symfony Blog, Fabien Potencier shares some of his thoughts about the Symfony community and tosses out an idea of a way to "gameify" the process to let community members proudly show off their level of involvement.

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

In a new post to DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi asks developers what new feature of PHP 5.4 is the most important to you and your application development?

Recently, the voting process for PHP 5.4 open to committers and users have been closed. We now have a clear picture of what will make the release and what will be left out. Some of these features (traits, web server) were already in, while other have been just voted and will be completed before the general availability of the release.

He lists out some of the major changes that'll be coming in the 5.4 release including traits, dereferencing, the built-in HTTP server, closure type hinting and the upload progress feature previously only in an extension. The end of the post includes a poll for you to give your feedback on what you think is the most important. As of the time of this post, the array dereferencing has pulled into the lead with traits coming in second.