On the Laravel News site today there's an announcement about the next Laravel Live UK conference happening this coming June (2018) in London.

Laravel Live UK is a brand new one-day conference that will be held on June 12th, 2018 at The British Library.

Confirmed speakers include Matt Stauffer and Lorna Jane Mitchell. They’ve also just opened up CFP, and are specifically looking for talks focused on diving deep into Laravel and the Laravel ecosystem.

The conference already has tickets on sale for this single-day event too. The Early Bird tickets are already gone but you can get a General Admission ticket for £100 or a last minute ticket for £125.

Rob Allen has a quick post showing how to use PHP's own NumberFormatter function to correctly format currencies (versus just number_format).

I've been using number_format() for a very long time, but recently discovered that within the intl extension there's a NumberFormatter class available too. This is quite a clever class as it is Locale aware and handles formatting currency, including the correct symbol. You can check if you have the intl extension installed using php -m | grep intl and if you don't then you can install it with apt-get install php5-intl or yum install php-intl assuming you use your distro's stock PHP. (If you compile your own, then --enable-intl is the switch you need.)

He gives some bits of example code showing you how to use this object, formatting the same amount for both the typical UK and German Euro formatting. The formater doesn't do any calculations for you, so the number you give it is what will come out the other side (no current exchange checks). He's also created a helper you can use if you're a Zend Framework v2 user.

On 7PHP.com there's a new interview posted with the organizers of the PHP Hampshire user group about the group, organizers and challenges they face.

James Titcumb, one of five organizers of the group, answers questions about:

• What their user group is about and what their goals are
• The size of the group and the key people involved
• How they find sponsors for their event
• How it's different from other user groups
• Some of the lessons they've learned so far

You can read the full interview here and, if you're in the Portsmouth area, be sure to check out the group!

The QaFoo group has announced a giveaway they're doing of a ticket to this year's PHP Unconference Europe:

PHP Unconference Europe is an amazing PHP community meet-up. We would love to help you experience this event and therefore raffle 2 x 1 ticket (viable for non-german as well as german participants). In order to take part in the raffle, just complete the following sentence in a Tweet: "PHP quality is … /cc @qafoo". Replace the "…" with something that you consider important for software quality in your PHP projects and CC our Twitter account (required).

If you haven't heard about the PHP Unfonference Europe, it's a yearly unconference style community event where the participants set out the schedule based on who wants to present and what they want to hear when the event starts. It's less about formal presentations and more about discussion and and "experience sharing." It will be happening May 4th and 5th in Manchester, UK.

On The Bakery they've officially announced CakeFest 2012, happening in Manchester, UK from August 30th through September 2nd (some days are conference sessions, others are training).

CakeFest is the annual CakePHP Conference. It brings together developers, users, and interested parties from all over the world for a four day event filled with workshops, talks, dinners, social events and plenty of fun! If you are interested in giving a talk at CakeFest, we still have submissions open! Just head over to the CakeFest, sign up and submit your talk proposal via your account page! We're open to anyone for submissions, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can also purchase tickets to this year's event (with a discount for students) ranging from $420 USD for just the conference out to $950 for the conference + tutorial days. They'll have talks from core CakePHP developers, time for lightening talks and a panel discussion where you can ask your own questions of the Core development team. You can get complete details about this event on the conference website.

In a new post to his blog today Philip Norton has made his announcement about this year's PHP North West Conference 2011 happening October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK.

I have attended the last 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been of a very high standard in virtually every way. [...] The conference will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be lots of coffee breaks and there is usually a free bar in the evening of the Saturday.

Tickets aren't on sale yet for the event, but it shouldn't be too long before the Early Bird pricing is announced. Potential sponsors can find more information here and you can keep up with the latest by following @phpnw11 on Twitter.

Rob Allen has shared a bit of code he's put together to help with validating UK postal codes (since the functionality in Zend_Validate doesn't cooperate), so he extended the main Zend_Validate_PostCode with his own validator.

It's easy enough to add a filter to remove the space, but I'm a little worried that when (and if) it gets fixed, will the fixed version Zend_Validate_PostCode then fail to validate postcodes without the space? In theory it should as the space is part of the spec. I'd hate my code to unexpectedly break due to a valid bug fix. I can easy work around this worry though by simply creating my own extension of Zend_Validate_PostCode.

The thirty-five line code example allows you to correctly validate the postal code with a quick call to the "isValid" method. He also links to another method from Paul Court to handle things similarly.

Stuart Herbert has a new post about a new user group starting up in southwest UK:

London and the North West of the UK have their own successful PHP user groups...and it's time we had one here in the South West :) I've setup a PHP SW group on Google to get us started, and we’re already talking about where (probably the centre of Bristol) and when to have our first meet-up. Why not join the group and the discussion?

There's already a first discussion going about the meeting location with plenty of suggestions. If you're in the area and are interested in attending, check out this Google group for more info.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell mentions the Leeds PHP user group that's "sprung up" and is gaining traction in the area.

So far it has met twice and its been a good crowd both times. Our meetings at the moment are at Brewery Tap, which is not only the closest pub to the train station in Leeds, it's also got some great beers!

The meetings are on the third Monday of each month and next up (on August 16th) is Ben Waine talking about XDebug. You can find out the latest on the group on their site and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates.