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!

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!

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.

Luke Fitzgerald AKA darkip posted an update today on his Google Summer of Code project for which he’s building a Phergie plugin to interface with StatusNet. The Phergie team is excited to see his progress, has enjoyed working with him immensely, and appreciates the contributions he’s made back to the Phergie project.

Luke Fitzgerald AKA darkip recently joined the ranks of Phergie contributors. As it turns out, he’s also participating in the Google Summer of Code program — and using Phergie to do it! He’s developing an IRC plugin on top of Phergie to interface with StatusNet and has already made several contributions to the Phergie project as a result. We feel privileged to have him working with us and humbled to see our team’s work included in a GSoC effort.

Brandon Savage, who recently began contributing to the Phergie project, published a blog post today that spotlights the Phergie project as an example of good architecture and creating a low barrier to entry for prospective contributors. His kind words and evangelism of the project are appreciated as are the excellent points that he makes on the post’s overarching topic.

Shortly following the mention of Phergie in episode #4 of the oddWeek Podcast, Cal Evans graciously invited Matthew Turland to appear in episode #5 and talk about the Phergie project. A great time was had by all and a lot of wonderful discussion took place. Be sure to download the podcast and give it a listen.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the oddWeek Podcast is a great source of information on people and events in the PHP community at large. It’s hosted by Keith Casey and Cal Evans of Blue Parabola. The most recent episode of the podcast includes an interview with Elizabeth Naramore, an active member of PHPWomen who is recruiting for the new PHPWomen Partnership Program. The Phergie project was recently solicited for membership in the program, which we happily accepted, and they were nice enough to give us a mention in the podcast. Check it out!

In case you missed it, the yearly run of PHP Advent for 2009 included an article by Sean Coates, an active contributor to the Phergie project. In this article, Sean describes his interesting use of Supervisord, a Python-based client/server system for monitoring *NIX processes, to run Phergie as a daemon. It’s a wonderful read if you’re looking for a way to run Phergie in the background without using screen.