It's that time of year again - time to gather the votes for this year's PEAR elections for the role of President and others to be inducted into the group.

As every year it is the time of the election for the PEAR Group and PEAR President for the year 2008 and 2009. If you haven't casted your vote just yet, NOW is the perfect time to do it so go to the election page and place your vote.

You can find out more about the elections from the page for the Presidental election and for the Group elections. You must be a PEAR developer in order to vote.

Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

The International PHP Magazine is back with the results on their latest poll today that asked developers to vote on which, of their options, a PHP developer should give the most effort towards when creating their applications.

Options included "Magic Methods", "IDE's" and "Database Support" but the number one option that got the most votes by far was "Classes". This left second ("All" at 19.3 percent) and third ("Database Support" at 8.4 percent) place in the dust.

If you're a CodeIgniter user, be sure to get your vote in on this week's poll asking users to vote on which of the feature options they've given is what makes CodeIgniter the best framework out there.

As posted about on his blog today, David Coallier and others have been voted into the new PEAR group's team:

I would like to say thanks to everyone who has voted for both the rest of the Team, and I :-). So the new PEAR Group team is built of the following members: Martin Jansen, Arnaud Limbourg, Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Helgi Thormar, Paul M. Jones, Justin Patrin and finally myself David Coallier.

Team, here we go, let's get some good and solid work done! I am looking forward for such cooperation with both PEAR contributors and other frameworks out there!

He also includes a lengthy listing of some of his personal work for the upcoming months, including work on several of the PEAR pcakges - MDB2, Text_CAPTCHA_Numeral, pearweb (the PEAR website), Image_Transform, and HTML_AJAX.

In a quick post to his blog, Lukas Smith notes his support of the recent announcement of the PEAR elections.

I am confident that both of the proposals will help in improving collaboration in PEAR, mainly because they basically provide the same organization we used to have for all of PEAR (which worked great in the beginning), now for categories of related packages.

He reasons that, since PEAR is such a huge project, it needs this kind of approach - a method to the madness - to help keep the project on the right path.

Greg Beaver has announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.

In his latest post, Greg Beaver gets excited about some of the recent advancements in PEAR including: more traffic on the mailing lists, improvements to the acceptance policies and documentation for packages, and fun things like the download statistics and a Google Map of developers.

His real excitement comes with the latest offering the PEAR group is creating to pull more of the PHP community into the project and make them feel a part - a new election interface to vote on packages and the future of PEAR.

Most of the important decisions I mentioned will be decided by a general election, meaning that the users of PEAR, not just the developers, will have a voice in the direction PEAR decides to take.

PEAR developers out there are already registered to vote, but if you'd like to get in on the action, head over to the signup form and get involved today.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll question - "What Makes a Good PHP Security Architecture?" The answers for this poll included:

• Possess a low attack surface area approach by default
• Ensure that backward compatibility is not broken
• Not include unsafe constructs and patterns

The option that came out on top (by far) was "Reflect the basic architecture pattern, that is 'deny unless permitted'" with 40 percent of the votes. The next closest option was the "Not include unsafe constructs and patterns" choice with 15.4 percent.

Be sure to check out and vote in their new poll asking readers to vote on what features they think a PHP editor should posess.

Packt Publishing has announced a new contest today looking for the "Best Open Source Content Management System" out there (for 2006):

Packt Publishing is currently looking for people to nominate their favourite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/award. The five projects that receive the most public nominations will go through to a final round of voting, with a panel of judges and votes from users deciding who receives the $5,000 prize.

The award will be voted on by a panel of judges and visitors to Packtpub.com and is designed to "recognize and reward outstanding achievement in a high quality and highly competitive marketplace".

For complete information, check out their official page for the contest.

Tobias Schlitt is advocating, in his new post, a proposal that's been put out there to get things back where they belong and renew the PEAR Core-QA group.

The proposal asks all of the current Core-QA members to nominate a maximum of seven people and a voting process to narrow them down. Individuals nominated will be contacted and those with more votes to their name will be considered for the new team.

The voting is only open to the current Core-QA team, so this is not a "public election" but it does have a very big impact on the PEAR project and how well it is maintained in general.