The Zend Developer Zone has a reminder for those in the Amsterdam area - the phpGG user group (newly formed) will be having their next meeting on September 23rd.

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.

In this new post to the Ibuildings blog Stefan Koopmanschap talks about the Dutch PHP TestFest and how it all turned out.

This dutch event, which was sponsored by Ibuildings, was part of the global PHP TestFest initiative, which aims to get a higher test coverage for the PHP language and with that stabilize the language even more - something that will benefit all users of PHP. Back in May, we already deemed our event a big success with 10 attendees, a great presentation by Sebastian Bergmann and a huge number of tests written. But it turns out to be an even bigger success.

Out of the 158 tests written up by the group 39 of them were accepted and are included in the testing suite. As a result, one of the members of the team (Felix de Vliegher) was also given commit rights to the full CVS repository for PHP.

For those that weren't able to make it, Sebastian Bergmann has posted a short summary of what went on at the Dutch PHP usergroup's TestFest 2008 event.

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.

As was mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, a Dutch PHP TestFest has been announced by Stefan Koopmanschap in a recent blog entry:

(from the ZDZ translation):

We are very proud that testing guru Sebastian Bergmann will be present at the meeting! Sebastian is the man behind Unit the test framework PHPUnit, and is seen as the authority in the field of tests and quality control in the PHP community.

The event will be happening on May 10th starting at about noon and going until around 4:30 in the afternoon. You can get more details from Stefan's blog entry including a link to register for the event.

Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has written up a summary of an event he recently attend and spoke at in the Netherlands - the PHP Business Seminar.

I've just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by IBuildings and Sogeti.

He talks about the conference, some of the presentations (a bit of which he caught, they were all in Dutch) and his experience presenting - twice, once with Red Bull and once without. If you want a bit more detail (and the slides from his talk) check out Cal's post on his personal blog too.

This year's Dutch PHP Conference has been officially announced:

Ibuildings and Zend Technologies are proud to organize the second Dutch PHP Conference on June 14. Plus a pre-conference tutorial day on June 13. Both programs will be completely in English so the only Dutch thing about it is the location. Keywords for these days: Know-how, Best Practices, Networking, Tips & Tricks

This year's even will be happening somewhere in Amsterdam and "big shot" speakers like Lorna Jane Mitchell, Zeev Suraski, Sebastian Bergmann, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Fabien Potencier, Marco Tabini, and Ivo Jansch will be presenting. If you register before April 14th, you can get in on the Early Bird Special of 350 Euro for both days, 295 Euro for the Tutorial day or 100 Euro for just the conference.

You can get the full story on this year's even (including the schedule) from the conference's main website.

According to this new post on his blog, Ivo Jansch is announcing that he and the rest of Ibuildings are going to be the Dutch representatives for Zend.

This means that we are going to support the Dutch PHP community with the entire Zend product range, training and support offerings. This is a big step for us, and I think it is a great reward for having provided professional PHP development services over the last years.

Obviously, everyone's excited at the announcement, and here's to hoping only the best for all involved.