Mar 29: Student applicatiosn for GSoC: Send in your applications!
As others already wrote PHP participates in this year's Google Summer of Code program. If you are a student we'd welcome your application!
Some general hints:
- Feel free to propose your own ides, our list of ideas doesn't list everything possible.
- We are not interested in proposals for new frameworks or "I want to create my homepage using PHP", our ideas page should give you a good picture about the kind of stuff we are interested in
- Do some research on the subject, don't just copy&paste from our ideas page (we know that text!) but give us your opinion about the project
- Give us relevant information about you, we are, for isntance, not interested in the name of your cat.
- We are not thatm uch interested in people who take the money and leave, we prefer people who stay with the project, help with maintaining their code and maybe even other parts of PHP
Mar 25: PHP 5.3: Up to 30% performance win
Dmitry posted results of performance test comparing PHP 5.2 and 5.3 to internals which are impressive numbers:
- Drupal 20% faster
- Qdig 2% faster
- typo3 30% faster
- wordpress 15% faster
- xoops 10% faster
Up to 30% performance win by simply updating PHP! Please help us with the quality assurance and test your applications using a 5.3 snapshot - we can't cover every usecase, you can!
And again as a sidenote: 5.2.6RC2 is out, please test that, too 
Mar 20: Easter - Don't just look for eggs but also for bugs
Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.
Currently we have the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 out. Test it now with your code! We do our best to test it but we can't cover every use case so we need your testing! The simple rule is: Who doesn't test in time shouldn't complain later if their application breaks. 
5.2.6 shouldn't brake anything but sometimes there are unexpected side-effects. Now we can fix them, it's harder after the release.
For 5.3 things are different. We are going to break stuff, but only with good intentions. The latest break we did is dropping the zend.ze1_compatibility_mode ini setting. That setting was broken from day one and gave lots of confusion. So test your applications in time and report unintended breaks you discover.
Of course you should always test the latest snapshots while doing your development but a few more free days might simply give you more time and a chance to give something back to the PHP project. For supporting PHP you might also read about the upcoming PHP TestFest and GSoC.
Mar 18: PHP Unconference, Hamburg
Short notice: I plan to attend the PHP Unconference at Hamburg, April 26th/27th. I also plan to offer two topics there:
- An inroduction to .phpt testing as preparation for the to-be-announced TestFest at php.net and
- some ranting and Q&A session in the hope to destroy some FUD and myths about PHP.