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!

You’ll notice that this web site now has a Changelog page, where you can view all information pertaining to our first maintenance release, 2.0.1.

In a nutshell, we had a few small feature additions, several bug fixes, and a large design issue that resulted in a few BC-breaking changes to fix something that was already broken and hopefully won’t affect many plugins. Many thanks go out to people who have reported bugs and submitted patches; this project would not be what it is without your support.

On a related note, API documentation for the core is now available both online and in PEAR package form. A link to the online version and instructions to install a local copy via the Pirum server are both included on the Developers page.

Lastly, as you may have noticed from the logo in the right column of this web site, the Phergie project has been invited to participate in the new PHPWomen Partnership Program. We welcome any and all PHPWomen members who would like to participate in the Phergie project to join the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network, pick one of our many issue reports, and start working with us to improve Phergie!

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.

Up until recently, the main web site for this project was constituted entirely by its Trac wiki on Assembla. Among other efforts going into the project’s next major version, it was decided that it should have a web site with a bit more substance.

This new site will be used to announce future releases and showcase new plugins and other related content contributed by the community. It will also house pages for user and developer documentation.

In addition to the web site, version control and issue tracking have been migrated from Subversion and Trac on Assembla to Git and Github Issues on Github. We’re hoping this will make contributing to the project even easier.

Note that not all plugins from the 1.x branch have been ported yet, only those essential for basic functionality. We hope that you’ll join us in the effort to complete this conversion by consulting the issue tracker to see what remains to be done, forking the new git repository, committing patches and additions, and submitting pull requests so we can import your work into the main repository.

We look forward to seeing what you do with Phergie 2.0!