Johannes Schlüter

The time is just running and it's already time, again, for students to apply for this year's Google Summer of Code program. PHP and MySQL are among the list of 150 participating organizations. So if you're a student and are interested to learn how OpenSource works, do some networking with some famous people or just want a Google T-Shirt it's your time to take a look at the different idea pages (PHP, MySQL, others) or come up with an own idea and apply. Oh if accepted you even can earn some money as part of the program ...

Just a short note: The deadline for applying to GSoC has been extended by Google till April 7th! So we hope to get a few more great proposals! So what's a great proposal? It's a good idea (either from our ideas page or some own idea) Being creative and having an own idea which is acceptable might look harder on first sight as you have to come up with an idea, discuss it beforehand to see whether it's acceptable and maybe fine-tune it then before wasting too much time but applying for an idea from our ideas page means that there are other candidates who want to do the same which therefore means you have to show us why you are the perfect candidate for that task and are better than others.

So please contact to us (see ideas page) if you want to discuss your ideas and apply!

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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

And now: Hurry up, do your research, contact us (see ideas page) with questions and apply. The deadline is set to March 31st!

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.