In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans looks at PHP, the community and how user groups fit into the mix. He shares opinions from the community and a video taken of a roundtable at this year's TEKX.

Those that know me know that the PHP community is near and dear to my heart. I am always looking for ways to support it, usually to the chagrin of my employer. We have the greatest community of any programming language I know of and I like helping people find ways to participate in it.

The video is a roundtable featuring Raphael Dohms, Lorna Mitchell, Michelangelo Van Dam and Ben Ramsey talking about some of what they've seen as experienced group leaders. Cal also includes suggestions from other community members about what has worked in their user group (to help others out there either just getting off the ground or wanting to grow their group).

In the wake of this year's TEKX conference (held in Chicago lat week) several of the PHP community members that were able to attend have posted summaries of their time there. Here's the list so far:

• Lorna Mitchell
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Ligaya Turmelle
• Chris Hartjes
• Bradley Holt
• Garrison Locke
• Rich Bowen
• Jason Austin
• Keith Casey
• Rob Allen
• Chance Garcia

There's also the official wrapup from Cal Evans on the php|architect site.

If you were able to attend TEKX this year and have a post you don't see on this list, let me know and I'll get it added!

On the echoLibre blog today there's a new post talking about the release party (at the TekX conference in Chicago) for their latest project - FRAPI, a RESTful API framework that's already generating a lot of buzz.

The party was loud and fun. People chatted, asked a bunch of questions, complained, encouraged us and thanked us. We even turned around and made a live demo with no preparation whatsoever and, believe it or not, there were no bugs during the demo. The future is looking very bright for FRAPI which has attracted a LOT of attention over the past few days and we are looking forward for even more in the coming weeks.

If you'd like to find out more about the FRAPI framework and how it can help you in easily creating RESTful applications, check out the project's website. There's details on the framework, learn how to get involved and give back to the project and how it lets you focus on the the important things, like the business logic, while handling the presentation for you.

Chance Garcia has posted more of his great "live blogging" posts from the various sessions he's been attending at the TEKX conference happening in Chicago. The new posts covered the sessions on:

• continuous integration in PHP applications (Sebastian Bergmann)
• code release and management (Eli White)
• Date and Time functionality (Derick Rethans)
• Zend_Form (Rob Allen)
• memcache and apc (Ben Ramsey)
• Scalability & MySQL (Ligaya Turmelle)
• Streams, Sockets & Filters (Elizabeth Smith)
• New SPL Features in PHP 5.3
• XDebug (Derick Rethans)
• Corss-Platform PHP (Elizabeth Smith)
• Marco Tabini's closing remarks

I'm sure more posts can be expected from today's sessions, so keep an eye on his blog if you weren't able to attend this year's conference.

The TEKX conference is now in full swing and one attendee, Chance Garcia has already shared some of what he's learned at the tutorial days - being the bad guy and best practices.

Chance Garcia was in the "Bad Guy For a Day" session given by Arne Blankerts

This will be interesting since this will be stream of thought on the tutorial as it goes on. [...] Remember to secure your infrastructure. Anecdote about a setup with default root of database was given. Keep in mind how you train users. Example error alerts training people to accept errors as ok and to click through.

He "live blogs" the rest of the session that mentions infrastructure issues, user interface problems and some of the more popular attack vectors.

His other "live blog" covered Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Lorna Mitchell's Best Practices talk, complete with mentions of version control practices, design patterns, unit testing and more.

php|architect has announced another podcast series leading up to this year's TEK-X conference happening in May.

Last year php|architect and Microsoft got together and hosted a series of webcasts on topics of interest to PHP developers. We had so much fun that we are going to do it again this year. As most of you know, we had so many great proposals submitted to TEK·X that there was no way we could schedule them all. This year, instead of saying "Sorry, better luck next year" to these presenters, we selected the best of the ones that we couldn’t find room for and invited them to be a part of the webcast series.

You can see the full list of the webcasts on this page. This round includes topics like Doctrine, Drupal, caching on WordPress and Windows Azure. You'll need to register to attend, but there's no charge for the registration. The first one starts next week - Friday, March 5th with Jonathan Wage covering Doctrine 2.