The Adobe technical evangelism team will be hitting the road in October talking about our recent announcement with Zend. PHP developers who are interested in learning about Flex and Zend should join Kevin Hoyt, Danny Dura, Ryan Stewart and Christophe Coenraets as they show developers how to get started with Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and Zend.

Check out this list of locations to find one near you to attend. They run from the first of October through the first part of November.

The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and the surrounding area, and also evangelizing the PHP technology to universities and enterprises as well.

The group has held other events this year but this one is the first which will be completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others.

For more information about the Barcelona PHP Conference 2008, including more information on the location, speakers and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es.

You may recall PHP Groups being created over a year ago for the purpose of networking together the leaders and organizers of PHP user groups around the world. I've been very bad about keeping things moving on this front, but I want to pick things back up and get us talking again.

If you'd like to subscribe to the list, send an email to ug-admins-subscribe [at] lists.php.net. If you don't want to subscribe but still want to keep track of what's happening, point your news reader to news://news.php.net/ug.admins.

Last week the Belgian PHP User group held their second meeting. Because the venue was fairly close to our office in Vlissingen, some of us decided to have a look. We were early, so there weren't many people yet, but soon the room began to fill up and in the end there were a little over 30 people. Not bad, given that this was only the second meeting.

Talks given covered methods for improving your PHP development (best practices) and a look at the Zend Framework. There were even raffles for fabulous prizes (like copies of "Enterprise PHP Development", elePHPants and a ticket to attend ZendCon this year). Check out the group's website for more information on the next meeting and other bits of info.

It felt a little strange presenting a JavaScript topic to a bunch of PHP developers, but I made it come back to PHP by demonstrating a the latest Panda PHP package which is only in incubation at the moment.

You can check out the slides on Slideshare and download the code from his site.

In this case the opportunity is that I am (or the community) is forced to find someone else to step up and spread the word. So I am hereby calling out to the community and speakers at North American conferences to try and integrate emPHPower discussions as "official" birds of feather or lightning talks.

As mentioned, his call also includes a suggestion for all PHP user groups out there:

Actually lets make this call a big larger, I call out to all the PHP UGs in the world to talk about emPHPower and blog about their views, concerns, ideas. If you are a member of a large PHP project, also consider to get feedback from its user community.

If you're wondering what the emPHPower movement is all about, check out the group's main site for full details.

I arrived shortly after noon, just in time for the start of the test fest at 12:30. After a short introduction to PHPT, we started writing tests for the Reflection API. We managed to write 37 tests with 10 people in 4 hours.

You can find out more about the user group on their website including meeting times, locations and links to other great PHP resources.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. [...] All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests.

Several groups have set up their times (here's the list) including teh Atlanta PHP group's happening today and the Cologne/Bonn user group's happening tomorrow. If you want to get in on the action and haven't found a group, check out the list and see if there's one nearby and join up before the event starts!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a checklist as a reminder of things to bring with you to your local event.

I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas finally has a PHP User Group and our first meeting is...tomorrow. I am pretty excited as I know there is a fairly decent size PHP programmer community in LV, it just hasn't been organized yet.

Their meeting is later today (April 11th) at 4pm at PT's Pub east of I15 and south of 215. It's an "anything goes" sort of even so expect to come, socialize and meet up with lots of great developers from the area.

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together.

The event is not only a teamwork/friendship building effort but will also help out the PHP.net mentors in a serious way - testing has largely been their responsibility and having a wealth of user-submitted tests to help out cuts their workload dramatically.

You can find out how to get you and your local PHP user group involved, head over to the TestFest homepage.