Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.

You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars. We're about to take those activities to the next level. We are going to build a 'PHP Center of Expertise'.

Efforts the newly formed group will contribute to include open source projects, aiding user groups, developing training materials and developing professional services related to PHP. The idea is still in the planning stages so any feedback or comments you might have are welcome.

On Tuesday 23 September 2008 the Dutch PHP user group will have its first meeting, in what will become a bi-monthly event. The goal is have meetings with other members, enjoy some coffee and tea and meeting other developers and the chance of prizes to win.

Two speakers will be presenting from about 8pm to 10:30pm - you can find out more about the group and the meeting from their site, including how to get there.

I simply knew we would need the extension capability that the Mdl class allows for sooner or later, I didn't expect it to be this soon though. The main problem here is saving a many to many relationship straight to the database from the $_POST array, to do that we can extend Doctrine Record with a new function I have named fromArrayExt which adds something extra to the normal fromArray method.

He shows how to extend the classes to create custom handlers for a grouping of checkboxes. The new code automatically handles their submitted values and pushes them directly into the database (with a simple save() call).

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

Nice URLs, readable URLs, search-engine-friendly URLs. Different names same deal. [...] Turns out this isn't all that hard with PHP - in fact it can turn into something that's very useful from more than just a readability viewpoint.

He shows how to use mod_rewrite and an .htaccess file to automatically grab the request and map it to the right place. Then, the PHP script looks at the incoming data and pushes the correct page back out to the browser. He's also included some modifications to the original idea that allow for numeric grouping and named groups for rewriting content.

Elections are now over and a new PEAR Group has been formed. Just like last year and always following the Constitution, the new members have been elected by a secret ballot of PEAR Developers.

Those elected include Joshua Eichorn, Christian Weiske, Chuck Bugress and Travis Swicegood. This year's President id David Coallier. You can find out more on the PEAR website page for the elections.

My place as I consider it and as Greg mentioned on the mailing list yesterday is much more "ambassadorial" than "presidential" and being the PEAR ambassador around the world, I'll be glad to discuss, argue, improve the general idea of PEAR to anyone. I'll also be happy to discuss PEAR2 if anyone is interested but first and foremost I'll be happy to help our new PEAR Group (which I am pretty sure won't need help ) and the community.

You can find out more about the results of this year's elections on the PEAR election pages from pear.php.net.

As every year it is the time of the election for the PEAR Group and PEAR President for the year 2008 and 2009. If you haven't casted your vote just yet, NOW is the perfect time to do it so go to the election page and place your vote.

You can find out more about the elections from the page for the Presidental election and for the Group elections. You must be a PEAR developer in order to vote.

It is now this time of the year again where the PEAR Group throws in the PEAR Group Nominations. The nominated people will then be called for votes by the community and 7 lucky (even though luck has nothing to do with it) will be elected as the new PEAR Group member for the year 2008-2009.

The entire PHP community is requested to nominate who they think would make the best addition to the group, regardless of how they're related to the PEAR project. Nominations should be sent to Martin Jansen by midnight (UTC) May 31st.