Justin Kozuch has submitted some information about a WordPress event happening February 11th in Toronto as a part of the Refresh Events series - WordPress: Zero to Hero.

If you want to learn how to create your own WordPress themes, understand how to use template tags and conditional tags to format and display the data you want, or how to use WordPress as a content management system, Nick will take you from WordPress Zero to Hero in 7 hours flat.

This workshop is for people who have a WordPress blog (or are in the process of creating one) and would like to create their own theme and templates for personal or professional use. This workshop is also for web designers who wish to offer a value-added service to their clients. PHP skills are not required to attend this workshop.

The cost for attendance is $125 CAD and includes wireless internet access/power, breakfast, coffee breaks and, of course, the great course material to be presented. It's recommended that attendees have their own local LAMP installation before coming as that installation will not be covered.

For more information on the event and to reserve your spot, check out this event page from Refresh Events.

This new post from the WPEngineer site gives you a few tips on using the event scheduling (cron) that the default WordPress installation already has built in.

WordPress has its own cron to automatically and scheduled run certain themes. Therefore WordPress provides several functions to use the cron.

In their example they show how to define the task to be executed hourly (sending an email), removing it from the task list and how to define a few more time fields (custom intervals). You can find out more about these event scheduling functions on this page of the WordPress codex site

In a recent post to his blog, Brian Teeman asks the question "is it time for an international Joomla event?" (speaking specifically of an all-Europe focused event).

Whilst I was traveling home from Joomla!Day Germany I started thinking about how long it was taking me and was the journey worthwhile. The answer was "not that long" and "yes definitely". [...] If we had a venue for Joomla!Day in the centre of Europe, in a place with excellent road, rail and air links is there any reason not to have a pan-European Joomla event.

He touches on some of the main topics involved in putting on a conference like that - the goals of the event, language differences, how long it would last, the organization of it and a few suggestions for ideal locations. It seems there's plenty of support in the comments, including a few mentions of similar events already in the works.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted some of his experiences at this year's TestFest organized by the PHPBelgium group.

We decided to test the SQLite3 extension, and we also had two people writing tests for LDAP. With a nice end result of 24 tests written for SQLite3 and 9 for LDAP, we are very pleased with the result since only 9 people attended our event. Our mentor Felix De Vliegher had given us a very clear instructions and apparently most attendees already had seen my (and other people's) slides on slideshare.net. See the pictures of those great moments on flicr.com.

You can check out some of the impact that they and other TestFesters made this past weekend in the PHP 5.3 code coverage report.

Zoe Slattery has posted some about how the TestFest effort is going this year and what the response has been from the PHP community in general.

It feels like a long time since we started on this road in February 2009. So much has happened since then ... and now we are two days away from the 9th May when several European groups will run events. We have 22 groups registered in all, Munich and Quebec have already run successful events. [...] It's great to see user groups helping out with PHP development in this way - I'm just amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and talent of PHP users.

She takes a second to thank sponsors - including Microsoft and Ibuildings (including their swag). The event will last through the end of June and test numbers will be calculated and evaluated for inclusion quickly after. You can get an idea of the current testing runs here.

The PHPNW user group (based out of Manchester, United Kingdom) will be taking part in this year's PHP TestFest, an event to encourage more complete code coverage of the PHP language through user-contributed phpt tests. Lorna Mitchell has more about their involvement in this recent post to her blog.

Our event will be on 9th May - you can sign up to attend (limited places so do let us know) on the upcoming page for this event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2299548/. The idea behind Test Fest is twofold: firstly, to give an approachable way for PHP developers to contribute back to the core - we'll learn how to write tests on the day and can continue to do so after the event of course! Secondly, PHP itself gets better tests, and the language itself gets better. All in all, I can't see a reason not to do it!

If you're not in the area of Manchester (or even in the same country) you still might have a group near you participating - check out this page on the PHP.net wiki to find one close (ten countries are represented so far).

If you're looking for Open Source events to attend in your area (or just about anywhere around the world), check out this calendar as provided by Init Marketing with a great listing of happenings in over fifteen countries around the world.

Below calendar contains world-wide conferences and trade fairs related to Free and Open Source Software, IT and specific industries. It also shows events where you can meet with InitMarketing.

Countries included in the list are Germany, the US, Japan, Italy, Australia, China and many more. If you have an event that's not on the list and you'd like to see added, leave them a comment on that page and they'll get in contact with you.

Thinking of attending one of the many upcoming PHP conferences and want to see some of the people that'll be attending? Check out this list of folks from Zend and the events they'll be attending.

Zend employees have been busy submitting to Call for Papers at various tech/PHP conferences and will be presenting talks around the world. Here is a list of who will be where.

Conferences on the list include PHP Quebec, PHP Con Italia and php|tek. You can find out more about who will be there and what they'll be presenting in the Zend Developer Zone post.

Wanting to attend the phpGG group's "Frontend Special" event next Saturday (the 24th)? Want a free ticket to join in the fun? According to this new post on the Ibuildings blog, you could win one!

Next saturday (24th of January 2008) the Dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) will host an all day frontend event in The Hague (Den Haag). [...] And if you're not interested in learning more about Frontend development or if you're not up for having a good time with like minded developers, I'd stay away... Otherwise I'd suggest checking out the special PHPGG page for more details and if you reply to this post before Thursday night, 23:58 (UTC+1) you can win a FREE ticket donated by the phpGG (there will be a raffle).

Be sure you get your entry in by the end of Thursday (the 22nd) night to be entered to win the free pass. You can find out more about the event on the phpGG homepage or here.

This recent post from i>Lior Messinger looks at five frameworks he considers absolutely necessary for every software developer out there:

If you are an architect with a team of developers, or one developer with a team of managers, here's a list of a set of modules, frameworks and strategies you should have in mind. Not all of them would necessarily apply to you, but if I were you, I would at least think about each one. So if you are starting a new project - lucky you - from scratch, or coming to an old project with a mandate for change, here's a small checklist.

The five types are:

• a good ORM (Object Relational Mapping) layer
• a tiered framework (splitting out interface, business and database logic layers)
• a event-based framework
• a caching framework (or some form of easy-to-use caching)
• an error/tracing framework

Some frameworks, like the Zend Framework, come with most of these already built in, reducing the need for more than one sort of technology stack.