Lorna Mitchell has a post to her site sharing a "call for help" related to the open source project she's a lead on: http://joind.in (a popular conference rating/feedback site in wide use across the PHP community). In her post she asks for help with the project and how you can help continue the success of the project/service.

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

She then lists some of the things the project needs help in including:

• manually check and approve events (the volume of spam we get is surprising, events are manually approved)
• review and merge pull requests across the repos in [the project's] Github organisation
• maintain the issue tracker, keeping it tidy and tagging issues, replicating bugs
• managing the @joindin twitter account - responding to questions and we often like to tweet to promote events and CfPs as well

She ends the post with an update for those that wonder if this is "abandoning" the project, reinforcing that focuses have shifted more to "keeping the lights on" rather than abandoning the project overall.

Open source is most powerful when we pursue our passions and my journey as a speaker and event host over the last 8 years or so would have looked very different without joind.in. [...] If the project isn't important, it will keep on winding down. If it is important, the community will pick it up - this wasn't originally my project, and now it is time to hand it forward.

If you've been to any PHP conference (or attended a PHP-related online event) in recent years, you probably have heard of the speaker/event feedback site Joind.in. The concept is simple: when you attend a talk or event you go to the site, give the speaker a star rating and leave them comments. This gives the speakers direct feedback on how they did and where they can improve. There's a a trick to giving valuable feedback, though, and Joshua Thijssen has posted some helpful tips to guide you and your comments in the right direction.

The joind.in website can be considered a presenter’s portfolio: it contains a list of talks they have done in the past (and where), plus it contains reviews from attendees. [...] This is why many conferences and presenters will talk about joind.in and ask you to rate and comments on their talks: it gives them feedback on how you experienced the talk, what can be improved to make it even better, and gives the presenters more chance to get accepted on even the larger conferences, where sometimes there are only 50 slots, but over 500 people submitted talks).

[...] Even though commenting and rating talks by itself isn’t really difficult and is quick to do so, there are some common “mistakes” and pitfalls which I’d like to discuss.

He breaks it down into five main points, elaborating on each as he goes through them:

1. Stars don’t tell you everything
2. Rate the presentation and speaker, not your expectations.
3. Don’t punish the presenter for external faults
4. Comment anonymously
5. Give suggestions on how to improve

For each one he also gives examples of good feedback versus comments that aren't as helpful to the speaker. Each one of these is an easy trap to slip in to, so remember them next time you're giving a speaker feedback (even if it's not on Joind.in!).

In this post to his site Larry Garfield takes a look at how insular the PHP community is and, instead of just expressing personal opinions on the subject, looks at data around some of the "same old faces" comments recently pointed at the PHP community.

Periodically, there is a complaint that PHP conferences are just "the same old faces". That the PHP community is insular and is just a good ol' boys club, elitist, and so forth. It's not the first community I've been part of that has had such accusations made against it, so rather than engage in such debates I figured, let's do what any good scientist would do: Look at the data!

He starts with a look at the Joind.in conference feedback site and the data it has to offer. This is what he's basing is research on, pulling the information from the site's JSON API to work through it locally. While the detailed information is attached on another page he does share a summary of his findings. Interestingly enough, just a bit over half of the speakers at these events were first-time speakers. His results show that there's an average of 13.1% of new speakers at each event too.

In her most recent post Lorna Mitchell talks about her own experiences in getting a current application upgraded and ready to run on PHP7. It can best be summed up in a tweet from her: "Total lines of code change needed to make the @joindin API work on PHP7: zero"

With PHP7 looking increasingly stable (relatively speaking, it's still pre-alpha so it's VERY early days and anything could happen!), and work going well on the GoPHP7-ext project to get extensions converted, I have been thinking about the migration guides we'll need to help people upgrade their existing applications. To this end, I took the simplest project I currently have (http://api.joind.in) and gave it a whirl on PHP7, using Rasmus' PHP7 dev box. [...] All in all, it wasn't a great study of what kinds of things can go wrong when upgrading projects, because as far as I can tell with the test coverage that we have, it Just Works (TM).

She points out that a major contributing factor to it "just working" in PHP7 probably has to do with the few amount of dependencies. She also suggests looking at the tools you do use and see if they're already doing work to make it cooperate on PHP7 when the time comes. She describes some codebases that should "just work" with PHP7 including smaller codebases and things created with more modern tools/libraries/frameworks/etc.

In his latest post Rob Allen gives a "first look" at a new feature in the Zend Server (v7) product from Zend - Z-Ray. The z-Ray feature gives you a complete "under the covers" look at what your code is doing including resource use, database connections and processing time.

I’ve been running the beta for all my development work for a while now and the main reason is the new Z-Ray feature. Z-Ray is a bar that is injected into the bottom of your page showing lots of useful information.

His post shares some of the results he found with his development version of Joind.in and screenshots of the results. He shows the levels of detail available at each level, all directly in the browser. It even includes functionality to track all variables being created or used in the current execution.

If you're a speaker (or even if you're not and just want to play with the API) and have information on Joind.in, Lorna Mitchell has a quick way you can pull you information from the site into an easy to use format.

I've recently been thinking that I should also do a better job of linking through to the various talks I'm giving/have given - and at around the same time I was contacted by the good folk at mojoLive about integrating against joind.in. To cut a long story short, the joind.in API now has the functionality for users to retrieve their list of talks!

Her example just uses a file_get_contents to pull the data from the remote URL in a JSON format. You don't need to be logged in to get to the talk information, though, so you won't need to bother with OAuth for this one. A snippet to loop through the results is also included.

This year's php|tek 2012 conference has just wrapped up - some great sessions were presented, contributions were made at the hackathon and patches gathered by all.

If you attended this year's event, please be sure to give the speakers some feedback (on Joind.in) and, if you weren't able to, check out the "Slides" section for the presentations.

Topics at this year's event included:

• Easing in to HTML5 and CSS3 (Brian Moon)
• Web Security and You (Eli White)
• (Re)discovering the SPL (Joshua Thijssen)
• Slim Your PHP, Fatten Your JS (Ed Finkler)

Lorna Mitchell has posted about an API release she's made for the Joind.in website today - the first stages of a completely reworked version of the site's API.

Following the principle of "release early, release often", I put live a very early version of the v2 API for joind.in today (so that I can use it in another project!). I haven't updated the documentation yet but in case anyone was thinking of consuming data from joind.in, this at least gives you an idea of the direction of the project so I thought I'd share.

The new service is RESTful and has a few working features already including fetching event and talk details, pagination and multiple output formats. You can find samples of the output here and here. If you're interested in seeing the source so far, check out the github account for Joind.in (and maybe even clone a copy).

Dave Gardner has put together a post about some work he did with the Joind.in API (an event feedback site) to apply collective intelligence to the results of the PHP UK Conference.

The term "collective intelligence" refers to intelligence that emerges from the collaboration of a group. In this case, we can leverage the data within joind.in and make "intelligent" recommendations. This post looks at building a simple recommendation engine using the data from joind.in. You can download the entire source code here (gzipped) or view via PasteBin here and try it out for yourself.

His code connects to the Joind.in API and fetches the event's talk information and the comments for each. His "calculatePearson" function then takes in two users and the set of ratings to figure out how similar their preferences are. There's also a bit of code that approaches it from a different angle - providing recommendations for users based on their own comments.

The PHPBenelux group has officially announced this month's BugHuntDay they'll be having near the end of November on Saturday the 27th in the offices of WEBclusive.

As has become tradition after 2008 (Zend Framework) and 2009 (symfony), we again organize a PHPBenelux BugHuntDay in November this year. We even decided to make the BugHuntDay a bit bigger. On Saturday November 27th, we will be focusing not on one but on two projects! We will focus on Zend Framework for the framework-heads, and on the Joind.in codebase for the community-heads.

Developers wishing to work on the code base for either project are welcome, whether you're familiar with the frameworks involved or not (Joind.in uses CodeIgniter). If you're planning on attending, sign up and mark yourself as attending on this Joind.in event.