The Zagreb PHP user group has officially announced the first conference to be held in Croatia. This one-day conference will be held September 14th at Hrvatska Gospodarska Komora.

As second anniversary of ZgPHP meetups is coming soon, we decided to organize a mini PHP conference in Zagreb, first PHP conference in this region. It will be held in Croatian Chamber of Economy, Nova Cesta 7, Zagreb on September 14th. [...] On our mailing lists, Facebook & Twitter we have around 250 members, in average we have 25 visitors on each of our monthly meetups and for mini conference we are hoping to gather 120 PHP developers (not only Zagreb but Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia …).

The event's call for papers is also currently open and will be until August 25th. If you're interested in speaking at this event, you can find information for submitting in the post. If you plan on attending, sign up on the Meetup page. They've also posted the fist round of speakers and sessions there as well.

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.