Jakob Westhoff has posted about a birthday one of the PHP user groups is celebrating - the PHP Usergroup Dortmund:

I'm writing this blog article from the HiccUp Dortmund, where our birthday meeting takes place. [...] Nearly all our oldies are present today to commemorate this anniversary.

You can get more information on the group and the wheres and whens of their next meetup over on the user group's page (including links to current information about several of the group's members).

Tobias Schlitt has posted an announcement about the release of a Call for Papers for this year's "Free and Open Source Conference" (FrosCon):

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund is proud to announce the call for papers for this years PHP room at the "Free and OpenSource Conference". The conference, which is organized purely by open source enthusiasts on a voluntary basis, will take place from 2007-08-25 and 26. Location of the FrOSCon will again be the University of St. Augustin (near Bonn), Germany.

This Call for Papers is just for the PHP room at the conference which will be held for two days this year. Check out the official site for more information.

Tobias Schlitt has a last chance post on his blog today for those that might still want to attend the PHP Weekender event starting this Saturday (Oct 7th).

I just returned from vacation and realized, that the PHP Weekender (the free-of-charge workshop weekend for PHP enthusiasts, organized by the [http//phpugdo.de PHP Usergroup Dortmund]) has 90 verified, registered attendees so far.

This is really cool, we never expected such a huge number of signups! Anyway, the PHP Weekender starts on upcoming Saturday, October 7th. If you did not register, yet, you should take your heels and run to our website, since we will only accept registrations until tomorrow 12:00 CET.

There's stil time to get your name on the list, so head on over and sign up today before it's too late!

Tobias Schlitt has announced on his blog today that their PHP event, PHP Weekender, has reached the 50 attendee mark already.

It is a great feeling for us to see how many people are interested. Since we are at the university, we have enough space left to get some more attendees in, but beware, space is already getting rare.

For complete information on this event, check out the homepage and sign up today. There's no charge - just show up and enjoy learning everything from beginner PHP techniques out to best practices and working with PHP 5.

Tobias Schlitt is officially announcing a new offering from the PHPers in the Dortmund area as voted on via feedback from others in the surrounding area - The PHP Weekender.

It's been a good month, since the PHP Usergroup Dortmund asked for feedback on the idea of a PHP introduction workshop in Dortmund. Because of the huge masses of interessted people, we expanded the idea and are now going to make a 2 day, 2 track PHP introduction weekend, including 2 workshops and a lot of interessting sessions about topics like "XML handling", "Enterprise PHP", "SOA" and "Shell scripting.

The event will be presented in German and will be happening October 7th and 8th at Dortmund University. You can get complete details about the event (and reserve your spot) from the event's main website.

Good news for those in and around Dortmund, Germany looking to get into PHP and see what makes it tick - the local PHP user group is discussing organizing a "PHP Introduction Day" for anyone interested (as mentioned by Tobias Schlitt).

We generally thought about making a whole day event, where we will teach people PHP basics in the morning and some advanced stuff (like best practices, usage of components, etc.) in the afternoon.

After sharing the idea with a local computer science department, they already have over 50 people interested in attending. If there's enough interest in attending, they have thought about expanding it out into a two-day event, including the development of a sample application as part of the course.

If you're interested at all in taking this course and are in the area, let them know by leaving a comment on Toias' blog.

Tobias Schlitt has posted about the sponsorship that has been created between PHP Solutions Magazine and the PHP Usergroup Dortmund he's a part of.

PHP Solutions is a developer-oriented magazine that's translated into several languages including English, French, and German.

The local PHP usergroup turns 1. The actual annuary of the first meeting is tomorrow, but since we meet every Thursday, we celebrate the birthday today. Although I'm not a member of the first minute, I'm one of the oldest members there. It's very nice to see, what we reached so far.

It's very cool to have a bunch of geeks around oneself. Not only that you always have cool ideas (of which you can realize about 5% in your lifetime), but also that you can discuss technical decisions so easily and can have input on all those problems you have.

If you haven't gotten involved in your local PHP user group, there's no time like the present! Head over to a site like PHPUserGroups.org or check out the PHP.net event calendar to find a user group near you. As Tobias mentions, it's always good to have a larger group of developers that are all centered around one thing to help generate ideas and solve problems collectively...

I will visit the PHP Usergroup Dortmund on January, 12 2006 and give a presentation on PHPUnit. The event takes place in the German office of eZ systems.

You can get complete information about the detials of the meeting from the PHP Usergroup Dortmund's website...