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.

The Phergie project now has a Google Group! Because not all users or developers frequent IRC, it was decided that some sort of mailing list medium was needed where users and developers can come together to discuss issues and potential new features as well as to offer support to the community. We hope you’ll join and we thank you for your continued contributions.

Who: Everyone and anyone who loves Phergie and wants to help make her better!

What: The Phergie Hackathon

Where: The #phergie channel of the Freenode IRC network

When: Saturday, June 19 from 10 AM CDT till the last person leaves

Why: We’re gearing up for a 2.0.3 release and we’re looking to knock out as many bugs as we can that currently block us from replacing the old Phergie 1.x instance currently running on Freenode with a 2.x instance.

How: Just show up in the IRC channel, pick a ticket from the laundry list, and start hacking. Feel free to post any questions you may have to the channel. If you want to hit the ground running on the day of the Hackathon, decide what ticket you’d like to work on and take a look at the developer docs and source code beforehand.

Hope to see you there!

Thanks to the efforts of Jess Planck, the Phergie project finally has a logo! You’ll now see it sported in the page header on this web site. The colors of the image have been designed such that Phergie shirts are a definite possibility in the future. Please take a moment to send a shout out to Jess on Twitter and thank him for his contribution!

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!

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!