In this new post to the Pehapkari.cz site they take a look at the PHP user groups all around the world and share some interesting statistics.

In April 2018 I started a side project to list meetups in Europe near Prague. PHP meetups are so much fun and I didn't find any single-page with a map that would list them. In the start, this site had a small table, with 10 meetups a month, very modern black/white Times New Roman design and advanced human-manual updating.

Since then I got feedback from dozens friends and users with this WTFs and ideas - they helped me to add feature now and then, polish a design with emoji and Bootstrap, automate everything and even crawl over 150 urls. I bought friendsofphp.org domain and the project became a standalone single page.

Based on the results shared in the post, there's over 1000 PHP-specific meetups all around the world! It also highlights the most active region (most meetups for the area): the area around Belgium. There's also a list of several cool features of the friendsofphp.orgsite and a more technical description of how the site works and gathers its data.

On the Laravel News site they have a new post sharing some of the Laravel-related events happening in July (2018).

Looking to meet other Laravel developers? Want to improve your skills as a developer? Consider attending a meetup or a conference in your area.

They have four events listed for this month:

• LaravelConf Taiwan 2018
• Laravel SF July Meetup
• Laravel Detroit: Code, Coffee, and Collaboration
• Laracon US

Dates and links to each are provided in the post including a link to the Laravel Events calendar.

If you've ever been interested in starting a technology-centric meetup in your area but haven't known where to start, Jef Claes has some helpful hints to help you get started.

I've organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start.

He breaks down the recommendations into a list of ten things to do to make a successful meetup happen:

• Contacting a speaker
• Gathering speaker requirements
• Selecting a location sponsor
• Contacting a location sponsor
• Meetup.com
• Speaker gift
• Recordings
• Day of the meetup
• Give thanks

While ten steps sounds like a lot, some of these are optional (like the speaker gift) but they can help to build a good reputation for the group and make it easier to find future speakers.

The Laravel News site has posted a video from a recent Laravel Sydney meeting featuring Jeffrey Way, owner and operator of the popular Laracasts screencast tutorial service.

The Laravel Sydney user group had a special guest in their latest meeting. At 5:30am, his time, Jeffrey Way complete with blood-shot eyes and a massive coffee jar did a live question and answer interview with the group led by Ben Corlett.

You can watch the video either through the in-page player or by heading over to YouTube to watch it there directly.

The Symfony blog has another in their "2014 Year in Review" series posted, this time with a focus on the London Symfony meetups and the presentations that were made.

2014 was a really successful year for the Symfony Meetup Group in London. I've been involved helping to organize these meetups for a few years now, but it was never a regular thing until this year. With a huge help of my SensioLabs UK colleagues we managed to bring the group to the next level. Each meetup we're getting around 60-90 attendees, which is a big improvement compared to the previous years. We also started recording the talks. Since the Symfony community in London is much bigger, I believe we can do even better in 2015!

Talks presented this year included:

• Optimizing Your Front End Workflow
• Applying Domain Driven Design with Symfony2 projects
• Silex saved me from my legacy code
• Scaling Symfony2 apps with RabbitMQ
• Speed up your Symfony2 application and build awesome features with Redis

Each topic has a summary, a link to the slides and a video of the presentation (if available).

Miro Svrtan has a recent post to his site talking about the first ever PHP meetup that happened in Belgrade in at the end of April organized by the PHP Srbija community.

With gathering of more then 250 developers this proved to be a much needed event there and congratulations to organizers for doing it. As a organizer of similar (but much smaller) PHP community in Zagreb I was in constant contact with organizers and was very happy when we were invited to join them on this occasion, especially when they approved my proposal to talk about Laravel4 there.

Even the local media picked up on the meeting and a larger venue had to be found at the last minute due to the overwhelming response. There were a few different topics mentioned (including BDD, a questionnaire, best practices in component libraries and web security) before getting to the main talk.

I would take this opportunity to thank whole PHP Srbija organization committee for inviting us & once again congratulate them on bringing such a large community together.

The /Dev/Hell podcast, as hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode 28, "Canadian Twinkie Smuggler".

You can blame Chris’s tomfoolery for how crappy he sounds, because his computer pooped all over himself and he had to call in on his iPhone. Nevertheless, we were able to discuss in detail the smuggling of mass-produced pastries of the Twinkie and Tastykake varieties. We also get framework security in the context of recent Rails vulnerabilities, and how PHP developers seem to have a heightened awareness of potential vulnerabilities. Ed’s details his experiences starting a local user group, and then discusses his efforts to speak at developer/tech conferences about his struggles with mental illness.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting this and other recent episodes.

In a recent post Miro Svrtan talks about a PHP developer community he started up in the Zagreb, Croatia area, the ZgPHP user group, and some of the lessons he learned in the process.

The year 2011 was a great success for developer communities in Zagreb. Although mobile developers started in 2010 with Mobile Monday, web developers were a bit shy and Ruby developers started first, then python meetups started and in the summer few people urged/pushed me to start organizing PHP Meetups. Besides colleagues I did not know a lot of PHP developers so I needed to spread the word about it. Twitter was the first step and it paid off. With only a few retweets there were already 10-20 people interested.

The post talks about the growth of the group, things they wish they'd done better (like involving local companies) and their work to create a custom logo for the group. If you're in the area and want to find out more about the group, check out their main page.

As mentioned by Phil Sturgeon, the London Codeigniter Meetup has come back and will be meeting at the end of this month (April 30th).

This month, since it's their first meeting, it's just a "networking" type of event:

Meeting in a pub, talking about our experience with CI, development in general, and networking.

The meeting is happening in London at 8pm on Monday, April 30th. For more information, check out this event over on Meetup.com.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog today about an effort that's underway to get a Banglore-area PHP developer user group started up:

The purpose of this meet is to share knowledge with the community, discuss issues you’re facing with others in the same field and help you network with other PHP professionals. This is not a one-off event, but we’re planning on making this a regular event. We haven’t really finalized the frequency of the events, but you can let us know of your preferences when you meet up with us this month.

A Meetup Group has already been started for the effort and they're in the process of trying to locate a good place to hold the meeting. Right now, the meetup is scheduled for the end of October, so if you're interested join the group and let them know your opinion on the location and their list of suggested talks.