Alex Mace gave a presentation at a recent PHPWM user group meeting on Phergie and the XMPP driver he’s been developing for her. It’s a great quick high-level overview of Phergie’s history and architecture and Alex’s experiences in implementing the XMPP driver. Go check it out!

After over 11 months — trust us, we don’t want to go that long without a release ever again — Phergie 2.1.0 is now available. You can read about the many bug fixes and new additions in this release on the Changelog page. This release sports several new plugins, a number of new plugin features and updates, numerous bug fixes, and a few unit test and coding standard compliance improvements. As always, our thanks go out to all of our users and contributors for their help in making the Phergie project a continued success!

Until now, the main GitHub repository for the Phergie project had been kept under a single user account at http://github.com/elazar/phergie. It has been transferred to an organization on GitHub. The new repo address is http://github.com/phergie/phergie.

There are a few reasons for this transfer:

• A new core team will be given merge rights to streamline acceptance of contributions where it was previously limited by the availability of a single developer.
• Eventually, plugins and other sub-projects can be split off into their own repositories within the same organization to be developed independently from the main project and to allow more fine-grained grants of merge rights.

Any pull requests and issues should be directed to the transferred repository. Any existing clones of the original repository will need to have their upstream remotes updated to point to the new location. This can be done using the following command:

git remote set-url upstream git://github.com/phergie/phergie.git

Any questions about this change can be directed to the #phergie IRC channel on Freenode or in a comment on this post.

Anthony Wlodarski has posted an example of an Upstart script he wrote to easily start, stop, and restart Phergie. The script source is open and freely available. Thanks to Anthony for taking the time to write up, publish, and tell us about his blog post on this neat method of controlling Phergie.

The increasingly popular Yii Framework project recently implemented a Phergie bot, which they’ve named YiiBot, in their #yii IRC channel on the Freenode network. One of their developers, tydeas, has made a few appearances in the #phergie channel to ask questions and discuss Phergie. He has produced several custom Phergie plugins for use in YiiBot. We’re very excited at this development and hope that the Yii project continues to use and extend Phergie, and perhaps even contribute some of their plugins back to the project!

The Developers page now includes a section on unit testing Phergie plugins. Efforts to improve code coverage of the Phergie codebase continue, so if you’d like to help out, find a plugin lacking a unit test suite and write one. If you’re developing your own plugins to contribute back to the project, try to include unit test suites for them when you submit them. Our continued thanks go out to all of our contributors.

Phergie 2.0.4 is now available. You can read about the many bug fixes and new additions in this release on the Changelog page. This release sports significant improvements in stability and unit test code coverage. As always, our thanks go out to all of our users and contributors for their help in making the Phergie project a continued success!

There’s a known issue with the Phergie 2.0.3 release that prevents some events from being processed. This is due to three circumstances:

1. Human error – In an effort to push the release out more quickly to replace the existing Phergie 1.x installation on Freenode with a 2.x instance, this issue was simply overlooked and somehow didn’t present itself distinctly during rudimentary testing. This was a big mistake on our part and we apologize to any affected users.
2. Lack of sufficient unit testing – This is something we’re working on. However, the problem was actually with two Phergie core components that had full code coverage. This shows that, while code coverage can be useful to expose blocks of code that are definitely not covered by any tests, don’t assume code is fully covered simply because code coverage says it is.
3. Unexpected behavior – What appears to be a bug in PHP itself, specifically in the FilterIterator class, contributed to the problem. Oddly, this class also appears to have full code coverage, affirming the related point above.

For those users affected, there are two options for dealing with this issue pending the next release.

1. Downgrade to Phergie 2.0.2 – Not ideal, but that release was relatively stable.
2. Patch 2.0.3 – The patch is in the git repository if you’d like to apply the patch to fix the issue yourself.
3. Run Phergie bleeding edge – This is done by cloning the git repository, placing your settings file on the same level as the Phergie directory, and running the phergie.php script there.

We’re hoping to make another release within the next couple of weeks.

My profound apologies for the even longer delay on this release — believe me, I felt it when putting together the changelog for it — but I’m elated to announce that Phergie 2.0.3 is now available. You can read about the many bug fixes and exciting new additions in this release on the Changelog page. With this release, we’ll be attempting to replace the dated Phergie 1.x installation running on the Freenode network with this new 2.x release. Once again, our thanks go out to all of our users and contributors for their help in making the Phergie project a continued success!

In an article released today, Developer.com outlined their top 10 PHP projects “pushing the envelope” by using the language in unusual and interesting ways. Phergie made #8 on the list with a mention of its recent inclusion in a StatusNet Google Summer of Code project. The Phergie team is honored to have their work featured alongside other spectacular PHP projects and thanks Developer.com for helping to spread the word about the Phergie project. A special thanks to Chris Cornutt, a Phergie enthusiast and the lead developer of PHPDeveloper.org and Joind.in, for bringing this article to our attention.