User groups can have a huge impact on their members. They can also have just as much of an impact on the organizer. I will tell you my story, and I hope to motivate you to start your own group. –by John Congdon

Inside the userland ecosystem, awesome development is happening as well – with major frameworks releasing new versions on a regular basis and big open source software packages starting to use said frameworks to make everything more compatible. All this is awesome, but obviously, people also need to earn their money. How does that work when the software is all out there in the open? How do you combine a focus on earning money when you operate inside such a community-oriented world? Let’s have a look. –by Stefan Koopmanschap

Organizing a user group can be an exciting, nervous, rewarding, humbling, gratuitous, and thankless experience. A mix of emotions! I stepped in to the organizer responsibility with zero connections in the community, zero experience with organizing any community effort, and zero idea of what I was doing. I was officially far outside of my comfort zone. What was I thinking? Simple: I did not want this great experience to go away, and I would do everything I could to make it continue for myself and for others that haven’t yet discovered this great resource. My experience in such a short time was so impactful to me that it had to keep it going. –by Chris Stone

Learn about the four elePHPants that have made such a big impact on my career and life. –by Rafael Dohms

I recently attended the SunshinePHP conference in Miami and had the opportunity to experience my first Hackathon, sponsored by Mashery and Twilio. Never having participated in one before, I didn’t know what to expect. There didn’t seem to be too much information to tell me, so here’s a five-step program showing you how to be awesome at your first Hackathon (and one extra step to do now)! –by Matthew Davis

Every year, Ibuildings hosts several hundred PHP developers in Amsterdam for a three-day event. It’s called the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC), and we like to think it’s one of the major PHP gatherings in Europe. Learn more about how DPC comes together and what we’ve learned over the years. –by Ross Tuck

Contributing to open source software is one of the core activities that helps make the PHP community strong and vibrant. This article takes a deep dive into the process, benefits, and challenges associated with contributing to an open source software project with a detailed look at reasons for contributing and ways to contribute with submitting source code. –by Andrew Podner

It’s good for you, it’s good for your career. Don’t miss out on the great opportunities available to you. –by Lonnie Brown

Zend_Form was one of my favorite Zend Framework components to fix issues for. It might have been because when things go wrong with a form, it is immediately apparent: it usually has a direct impact on the user because something goes wrong with their data. Apart from that, ”Zend_Form” had decorators. I know that many of us hated them, while others loved them. As for me, I liked the challenges they imposed. Regardless, in ZF 2, ”Zend\Form\Form” has been completely rebuilt and decorators are gone. Will I like the component again? It surely looks promising, especially because the vital responsibilities have all been refactored into their own components. I can’t wait to use hydrators and input filters, and what would be a better way to get acquainted with them then trying to eliminate an issue? –by Bart McLeod

I hope you enjoyed the first edition of Education Station last month and that you got a lot out of the PHP-Markdown library coverage. In this month’s column, we’ll be looking at a different tool, one which I’m confident will definitely make our lives that much easier, lessphp. –by Matthew Setter

We all cringe when we see old fugly codebases, but be careful – your codebase is only a few steps away. –by Eli White

I am so excited about this month’s issue. The community is amazing. Don’t miss out, join us! –by Elizabeth Tucker Long