The Dutch PHP Usergroup (phpGG) is having a special event at the end of January (on the 24th) - something they're calling the "phpGG Frontend Special".
Here's more from Stefan Koopmanschap's blog entry on the event:
I am quite excited about us organizing this event. This is our first step towards a full-blown conference, and I am proud of the speaker schedule we're putting together. We have speakers from Microsoft and Adobe who will go into their respective frontend and RIA technologies, Boy Baukema - the javascript expert at Ibuildings - will be talking about Javascript, and Robert Jan Verkade will give a take on HTML and CSS technologies. More on the content of the different presentations will follow as well as the actual schedule.
The event is free for active/paying phpGG members and will be 15 Euro for everyone else (for a pre-sale price, after that it's bumped up to 25 Euro). Along with the admission, this also gives you a one year membership in the phpGG.
Jamie Hemmett has a few suggestions for local user groups out there on what to do and not to do to help make their group successful. Some of it was gathered from personal experience, other tips from the recent user group panel discussion from this year's ZendCon.
I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).
Some of the observations/comments she mentions include:
Freelancing PHP developers may not feel like attending a group with "the competition"
Several factors dissuade developers from attending (distance, confusing schedules, timing)
Some ideas that groups out there could use to attract and keep more members
Why the groups can make you a better developer
and some sponsorship/promotion ideas to help grow and better the group
This is a great post packed with some good suggestions and observations. If you're involved at all in your local group (or would like to be) be sure to read it.
On the Zend Developer Zone Cal Evanspoints out some of the upcoming Flex tour dates to local groups all around the United States and Canada.
The Adobe technical evangelism team will be hitting the road in October talking about our recent announcement with Zend. PHP developers who are interested in learning about Flex and Zend should join Kevin Hoyt, Danny Dura, Ryan Stewart and Christophe Coenraets as they show developers how to get started with Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and Zend.
Check out this list of locations to find one near you to attend. They run from the first of October through the first part of November.
The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce its first international PHP Conference. It will be held Saturday, September 27th in Barcelona (at Citilab, Cornella).
The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and the surrounding area, and also evangelizing the PHP technology to universities and enterprises as well.
The group has held other events this year but this one is the first which will be completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others.
For more information about the Barcelona PHP Conference 2008, including more information on the location, speakers and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es.
Ben Ramsey has a new blog post that mentions a move for the PHP User Group mailing list - putting it official on the php.net services.
You may recall PHP Groups being created over a year ago for the purpose of networking together the leaders and organizers of PHP user groups around the world. I've been very bad about keeping things moving on this front, but I want to pick things back up and get us talking again.
If you'd like to subscribe to the list, send an email to ug-admins-subscribe [at] lists.php.net. If you don't want to subscribe but still want to keep track of what's happening, point your news reader to news://news.php.net/ug.admins.
If you live in Belgium and have been thinking about attending one of the PHPBelgium meetings but aren't sure what they'd be like, check out this post from Marc Veldman on the Ibuildings blog for a sneak peek.
Last week the Belgian PHP User group held their second meeting. Because the venue was fairly close to our office in Vlissingen, some of us decided to have a look. We were early, so there weren't many people yet, but soon the room began to fill up and in the end there were a little over 30 people. Not bad, given that this was only the second meeting.
Talks given covered methods for improving your PHP development (best practices) and a look at the Zend Framework. There were even raffles for fabulous prizes (like copies of "Enterprise PHP Development", elePHPants and a ticket to attend ZendCon this year). Check out the group's website for more information on the next meeting and other bits of info.
Michael Girouard has a new post (complete with slides about the PHP and Ajax presentation he gave at a recent New York PHP user group meeting, "Ajax for PHP Developers".
It felt a little strange presenting a JavaScript topic to a bunch of PHP developers, but I made it come back to PHP by demonstrating a the latest Panda PHP package which is only in incubation at the moment.
Furthering his emPHPower effort, Lukas Smith has issued a callout to all speakers at conferences and bloggers/user groups around the world to try to integrate(or just talk about) the emPHPower movement somewhere in to their community.
In this case the opportunity is that I am (or the community) is forced to find someone else to step up and spread the word. So I am hereby calling out to the community and speakers at North American conferences to try and integrate emPHPower discussions as "official" birds of feather or lightning talks.
As mentioned, his call also includes a suggestion for all PHP user groups out there:
Actually lets make this call a big larger, I call out to all the PHP UGs in the world to talk about emPHPower and blog about their views, concerns, ideas. If you are a member of a large PHP project, also consider to get feedback from its user community.
If you're wondering what the emPHPower movement is all about, check out the group's main site for full details.
For those that weren't able to make it, Sebastian Bergmann has posted a short summary of what went on at the Dutch PHP usergroup's TestFest 2008 event.
I arrived shortly after noon, just in time for the start of the test fest at 12:30. After a short introduction to PHPT, we started writing tests for the Reflection API. We managed to write 37 tests with 10 people in 4 hours.
You can find out more about the user group on their website including meeting times, locations and links to other great PHP resources.
Now that we're in to May, there's only one thing on a PHPer's mind (well some of them out there) - testing! This month several groups all around the world have set times for their own TestFests to dedicated time to writing up tests for PHP.
The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. [...] All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests.
Several groups have set up their times (here's the list) including teh Atlanta PHP group's happening today and the Cologne/Bonn user group's happening tomorrow. If you want to get in on the action and haven't found a group, check out the list and see if there's one nearby and join up before the event starts!
Sebastian Bergmann has posted a checklist as a reminder of things to bring with you to your local event.
