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This post provides insights into The PHP Foundation's recent activities.

My name is Roman Pronskiy. I’m employed by JetBrains to manage operations at the PHP Foundation. Reach out to me at [email protected]. You can find the full foundation structure here, including all board members, developers, and the community.

In September, we initiated an open call for new developers to join the PHP Foundation by launching an application form.

We received a total of 207 applications. From this pool, we selected a shortlist of 12 qualified candidates. Following a comprehensive review and input from existing foundation members, we further refined our selection to 4 outstanding individuals. We will soon announce the new members.

The primary focus for the new developers will be on the maintenance and modernization of PHP’s infrastructure — a critical step towards ensuring PHP being a robust and forward-looking language.

The public work undertaken by our developers can be followed in our monthly "PHP Core Roundup" series, which highlights the ongoing progress and developments within PHP core.

For our major sponsors, we offer exclusive insights through occasional digests that provide a deeper dive into discussions, debates, and early-stage developments. This not only keeps our sponsors abreast of the latest happenings but also allows them to see the direct impact of their support. This is one of the benefits of being an Advisory Board member.

We announced the advisory board initiative in March. Since then, 9 companies have joined the initiative with their representatives.

In addition to the Governing Board that includes Automattic, JetBrains, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways, Zend by Perforce, and PHP fellows, we now welcome the Advisory Board members: Moodle, Shopware, Laravel, Ardennes-étape, Les-Tilleuls.coop / API Platform, Aternos GmbH, PrestaShop, CraftCMS.

There were several useful discussions within the group. Specifically, we’d like to highlight the one around Property Hooks RFC. The Advisory Board feedback helped to shape the proposal design significantly.

By the way, you can already try property hooks on 3v4l.org, thanks to Sjon Hortensius.

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. Its goal to strengthen the open source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code. STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND). 

We have collaborated with STF to create work plans for these specific projects: PECL overhaul, Testing tool for FPM, Security Audit, and Documentation improvements.

We’ll share more details on each project early next year, and for now we are thrilled and grateful to the Sovereign Tech Fund for trusting us.

As mentioned above, STF is investing in PHP, and we are going to commission an audit of PHP's C code base. We expect security issues to be found. To mitigate possible bad perception, we aim to publish and fix the revealed security issues at the same time.

For this security audit, we are partnering with The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, Inc (OSTIF), a corporate non-profit dedicated to securing critical open-source projects. They have a proven track record of audits for popular open-source projects such as cURL, Git, Linux Kernel, OpenSSL, Node.js, and others.

Although we promised to prepare quarterly reports, that unfortunately did not happen to be feasible. So for 2023, we fall back to one yearly report. The 2023 transparency report will be published in December.

You can meet our team at the following conferences in late 2023:

You’ll be able to meet and talk to our board members: Nils Adermann, Sebastian Bergmann, Nicolas Grekas, and Roman Pronskiy.

Check out the Sponsors section on our website. It shows all major contributors sorted by donation amount.

Big thanks to the Sentry team for sponsoring the PHP foundation!

Sentry is a popular application performance monitoring & error tracking tool, and they just gave $500,000 to multiple open source maintainers.

Digital Ocean has been supporting the PHP project for ages – php.net servers run on DigitalOcean boxes. We would like to express our gratitude to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support.

Big thanks to everyone for your continued support – the PHP Foundation is all of us!

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That’s all for today. Follow us on X/Twitter @ThePHPF, Mastodon phpc.social/@thephpf, or LinkedIn @phpfoundation to get the latest updates from the PHP Foundation. 💜🐘