On the CodeUtopia blog there's a recent post with info on creating a custom event listener in PHPUnit that can help keep you database data completely clean.

When testing code which uses the database, you would usually want to make sure the database stays pristine for each test - All tables should be empty, as any extra data could interfere with the tests. You could probably write an extended Testcase class which automatically does this before each test in setUp and afterwards in tearDown, but it may have some issues. [...] Luckily, PHPUnit has a way to add event listener that react to certain events.

It uses the TestListener interface to make the event handler that (with the help of Doctrine) starts up, makes the tables with data and wipes them out at the end.

Code for the sample listener is in the post and included is the method for checking to see if you even need to use the database or not.

The Symfony blog has pointed out some of the interesting events that'll be coming up in their community including conferences, training and symfony camp.

The end of the year will be very interesting for the symfony project with a lot of opportunities to meet the community and to learn symfony.

Conference that symfony will have a presence at include this talk happening in Spetember and this talk at the International PHP Conference. Sensio Labs will be providing training classes on both symfony 1.0 and symfony 1.1 to those interested.

symfony Camp will also be happening in September. If you plan to attend, be sure to reserve your space now!

Christopher Jones points out a free event that Oracle is having at its Headquarters (in Redwood Shores, CA) - "Experience Oracle, PHP & Ruby/Rails".

Oracle is running a free workshop at its Headquarters on August 25th. This is a call for developers interested in developing applications in PHP, Ruby/Rails, Java, .Net or even wanting to use Oracle's free SQL Developer tool or learn web development with Oracle's APEX product.

They'll be providing lunch and the information, you just show up and soak it all in. You can find more information about the event here (and register to reserve your spot).

On the Ibuildings blog, Soila Patajoki has posted about two upcoming events in the UK and Irish PHP communities.

Following the success of our two PHP seminars in London, we have decided to make it a tour and to visit other parts of the UK and Ireland as well. Next up are Leeds and Dublin - come and meet us in your city! Find out more about our events below.

The first is a talk on source control happening September 9th (as presented by Lorna Mitchell) and the second being a talk from Ivo Jansch in Dublin - "Enterprise PHP and Zend".

Check out the blog post for more information including how to register (do it before the Early Bird special ends and get a copy of CTO Ivo Jansch's book Guide to Enterprise PHP Development).

Christopher Jones has a quick post with some information about a user group meeting happening in Brazil where the upcoming topic will cover the powerful combination of PHP and Oracle.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapeco on June 20." [...] He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

The schedule for the event can be found here with details on which talks will be given when (including Elton's at 8am on the 21st.

The Zend Developer Zone as posted a new screencast from Zend about the event debugging functionality offered with their Zend Platform product.

Zend Platform is a powerful tool both in development and in production. [...] One of the cool features of it is the Event Debugger. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how it works and how it integrates with Zend Studio for Eclipse.

The screencast is only about three and a half minutes long, but they cram a lot of screenshots and output results into that time. Cal Evans himself does the narration.

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.

Now that we're in to May, there's only one thing on a PHPer's mind (well some of them out there) - testing! This month several groups all around the world have set times for their own TestFests to dedicated time to writing up tests for PHP.

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.

If you're in the area of The Netherlands and you're into PHP, consider yourself lucky - just look at all the events that Ivo Jansch mentions in one of his more recent blog entries:

PHP is still growing in The Netherlands (according to nexen.net, 46% of Dutch domains use PHP). A good indicator of PHP's growth is the number of conferences and other events that are organized this year. [...] This year alone, there are already 6 major (>50) events; 3 done, 3 to go.

Some of the events (like Dutch Joomla Days and the PHP Business Seminar) have already passed but there's still a chance to get in on a few others like Kings of Code and the Dutch PHP Conference.

According to this post on the PEAR blog, the first PEAR bug triage is now over:

PEAR's bug tracker hit the 600+ open bugs mark a month ago. [...] So with 600+ open bugs (not including the feature requests), we had to do something. [...] The logical step was to hold our own bug smashing event and see how it works for PEAR.

Back on March 22nd and 23rd (Easter weekend) they hunted for bugs. Several developers showed to help out and many bugs were fixed and they managed to bring the number of open bugs for PEAR down to 547 with the two days of work. There were some milestones reached too:

Thanks to the triage, we are close to reaching two important milestones: Closing bug reports with lower bug ID than 1000 (1 bug left!) and 2000 (5 left).