Last Thursday I broke with tradition slightly and ran a Talk with the Experts session in the evening (down under), making it a bit more time-zone friendly for our UK audience. It also meant that I was able to swap my usual coffee for a wine, which probably made the session run a bit more smoothly. The subject was PHP and our expert was Lorna Mitchell, tutor of Object-oriented PHP and co-author of PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code.

The transcript starts with a collection of some of the links provided during the discussion and then runs through the entire conversation. There's some good advice in there, especially if you're relatively new to the world of PHP object-oriented programming.

In this edition I talked with Lorna Jane Mitchell, the Project Lead of Joind.in - built with PHP and proud to be Open-Source. She is the first female PHP programmer I'm interviewing on 7php.com and this makes it a special one. Lorna is a highly respected and highly looked-upon PHPer in the PHP Community with all her active contributions, writing so many insightful PHP articles, co-author of the famous PHP book "PHP Master|Write Cutting-Edge Code" and being a regular speaker at conferences - I was very lucky last week to have been able to attend her LIVE-online talk at Day Camp 4 Developers #4 (@daycamp4devs).

She answers some of the usual questions:

• How she got started with PHP
• Her top advice to PHP developers
• The best PHP book she's read
• What tools she uses for her development

Besides this, she also includes some words of encouragement to developers to get involved, not just in projects but in the PHP community.

With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can follow along with the presentation in her slides.

At 357 pages (375 including index), this book provides a thorough grounding in the key topics todays PHP developer should strive to know, and know well. The back cover ambitiously states that the book is "guaranteed to take your PHP skills to the next level". Keep reading to find out whether or not I agree.

She walks you through the contents of the book, noting that, despite her being an experienced developer, there were still things that she found new.

Despite the stated demographic, I think this book has a lot to offer novice developers. It would be a real challenge to properly digest and understand the wide range of topics covered, but an achievable and worthwhile one nonetheless. [...] If you're still undecided, my advice is buy the book - you won't regret it.

Savvy PHP web developers can now keep ahead of the game and ensure that their PHP code is safe, secure, and well-structured for the future with the latest release from SitePoint: "PHP Master: Write Cutting-edge Code" by Lorna Mitchell, Davey Shafik, and Matthew Turland.

The book covers a wide range of topics (somewhat replacing SitePoint's usual "anthology" type of book) including:

• An introduction to OOP
• Working with databases
• Creating and working with APIs
• Design patterns
• Security
• Automated testing

As part of a special offer, you can pick up your print+ebook bundle for the price of just the book, about $40 USD. If you'd like a sample before purchasing, they've posted three sample chapters.

Episode 129 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Lorna Mitchell (@Lornajane) one of a team of 3 co-authors working on an upcoming release for SitePoint, an advanced book on PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Of course, you can always subscribe to their podcast feed and get this and other new shows as they're released.

With the Call for Papers open and the for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011, it seems like a good time to bring in this interview from last year's host, Lorna Mitchell. Watch this short video for her impressions of the overall event, and some top tips for getting your talks accepted this year!

The Call for Papers is now open and will last until January 13th. Potential speakers are welcome to submit as many ideas as they'd like for consideration. Travel, hotel and a conference pass will be included for those selected.

The wonderful PHP Northwest 2010 conference took place last weekend in Manchester, UK, and our Marco Tabini was present to keynote Lorna Jane Mitchell's keynote "Teach a man to fish." Here's the transcript from the event (powered by Blue Parabola's upcoming live-blogging system Broadr).

You can also find more about the session on it's Joind.in page (including a link to her slides.

From Michelangelo's post:

This past weekend, Belgium was buzzing PHP all the way. PHPBenelux organized the first annual international PHP conference in Belgium and it can be called a true success. [...] This was the first conference that I not only attended, but was actually involved behind the scenes. It was a great experience and I have now more respect to organizers of bigger conferences now that we know what kind of challenges they have to overcome.

And from Lorna Mitchell:

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. [...] The conference itself was very well organised and the venue worked very nicely. [...] The venue itself was just across the car park and had plenty of rooms with an open exhibition space which worked nicely - the two tracks were on opposite sides of this space so the footfall for the exhibitors was hopefully good! Full marks go to the crew.

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I'm your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

In her personal post Lorna also mentions other roles she'll be taking on in the IBuildings PHP Centre of Expertise.