Colin DeCarlo and I have been working on a PHP users group for South Western Ontario for a while and we're pleased to announce the first meeting of the Guelph PHP Users Group. The group will be meeting on the last Wednesday of every month, starting on September 28th, at the offices of Well.ca at 919 York Rd, Guelph, ON N1E 6Y9 from 7.30pm-10pm. For the first meeting Ilia Alshanetsky, chief software architect for Advanced Internet Designs Inc, will be talking about 'Hidden Features of PHP'. For the second meeting Tony Thompson, Director of Technology for MRX will be talking about the Varnish web application accelerator. We're looking for speakers for other meetings so please get in touch if you have anything you'd like to speak about.

If you're interested in attending this first meeting, head over to this signup page and let them know.

Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on the left sidebar [of the Zend Developer Zone site], you'll see the last five that have been published.

You can also keep up with the latest webinars by befriending the webinarzend user on Twitter. The next PHP-related webinar is coming up on July 2ns and will cover PHP security (Kevin Schroeder presenting).

There may only be just 4 million+ of us Irish folk, but we do have an Irish PHP User Group which started up recently. If you're anywhere near Dublin or Cork cities on the last Wednesday of any month, meetings are held at 8pm on those days

If you'd like more information on the group there's on of two places to check them out - either on their website with details about meetings and group news or over on the irc.php.ie IRC server in the #phpug channel for more interactive information.

In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more.

You can sign up via Zend's site on the Webex page. The conference starts at 12pm Eastern time (GMT -04:00)/6pm Europe Daylight time (GMT +02:00) and will last about an hour.

Webinar Wednesdays will be an ongoing series of webinars and demos focusing on various development, deployment and business related PHP topics. Webinars will include presentations, demos and Q&A. Expected topics include: Enterprise PHP, Java Integration, PHP Security and Training.

The webinars are free of charge and are open to any developer wishing to attend. Many more topics will come in the future, but for now, there are only three on the agenda:

• Business Critical Web Applications with PHP (May 9th)
• Enterprise Enable Your PHP Applications (May 9th)
• Caffinated PHP, Integrating PHP and Java (May 23rd)