We felt that the other handful of PHP Meetup groups in the area cater to those just starting out more often than not. The engineers who are serious about building professional, enterprise-level applications don't really have a group where they can consistently expect presentations on those topics.

The focus of the group is less on the basic "hows" and "whys" of PHP and more on things like performance/scaling, optimization, testing and application architecture. If you're interested in joining the group, check out < href="http://www.meetup.com/pro-php/">their Meetup page. There's no word (as of the time of this post) on when their first meeting will be, but it sounds like an interesting group.

The primary responsibility I have, as being in charge of content is making sure that, well, we have good content. [...] While ZendCon may have the Zend name in it, it is the conference attendees who determine its success. It is whether or not you, as an attendee, are satisfied which determines my success in determining content. That said, I would like your input on what types of topics YOU would like to see. So if you have an opinion on what would make ZendCon compelling for you please leave a comment.

You can voice your opinion by leaving your comment on his post. There's already some good suggestions and lists for several hot topics around the community right now including deployment practices and community-oriented sessions. The date and the location for this year's event have not been released yet.

Since I last posted here we also published the schedule. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the call for papers and there are some cracking sessions, excellent speakers, and lots of overlap between the two! [...] Finally, this year PHPNW is expanding and has added an informal schedule on the Sunday morning since we know lots of people will be staying over. This will run from 9 til 1 and we've put out a call to ask what people would like to see on the schedule.

The Sunday event (held here) is a time for both current presenters and attendees to cast their vote on topics they really want to hear about (outside of the excellent sessions already lined up, of course).

For more information about the conference or to purchase your tickets, check out the page for this year's event. The deadline for the early bird ticket pricing is September 12th.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

With the beginning of issue 1.08 (coming to the newsstands in November 2007), PHP Magazin won't accept any articles or source codes that cover PHP4 topics or PHP4 sourcecode. Sourcecode delivery must cover PHP 5.2 or greater.

You can find out more information about submitting to this German publication on their website (including several topic suggestions to help get you started).

Included in the list are several PHP-related ones, including:

• the Ilovejackdaniels.com PHP cheat sheet
• the PCRE cheat sheet for PHP from phpguru.org
• PHP Template Designers
• the symfony project's guide to the framework admin generator

There's tons more where that came from including lots of other web-related ones for CSS, HTML, Javascript and the like. Check out this page on techtarget.com for the full listing.

Atlanta PHP connects and unites PHP users across the Southeast, provides world-class support and resources to the community, and advocates the adoption of PHP to local, national, and international businesses.

Their meetings happen on Thursday nights (the first Thursday of each month) and they're open to any and all topics from whoever. If you're interested, check out the official post for contact information. Note: compensation isn't part of the package, but is "being investigated for the future".

Vulcan is our brand-new mock testing system that enables you to verify your readiness for the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam.

Based entirely online, Vulcan gives you a quick, easy and effective way of testing your knowledge on the topics that count for the real exam.

They mention some of the features the testing has, including the same types of topics/question distribution/pass grade/etc and even gives you a breakdown of the topics you need to brush up on before the real exam. Best of all, it's only about $22.00 USD for a 10-credit pack (that's ten times to practice up on your skills and get as ready as possible for the exam).

If you're considering taking the exam, I'm not sure you could get a much better deal than this.

I had this request to implement a feature on a phpBB board whereby topics older than one month to get deleted. A quick search on phpbbhacks.com revealed a result - Auto Lock hack, but it had a disturbing note saying that it's not recommended for larger boards, although I couldn't figure out why. Anyway, the hack looked too involved, with DB changes, new Admin Panel options, etc., so I decided to hack something together quickly. Turned out to be pretty easy. Here' s the result.

Their version uses a simple SQL statement to do a perioding update on the table, marking the ones over a month old as locked. If the update fails, an email is sent. Then, so that no cron job would be needed to make these updates, a semi-random item was placed in the page to run when the user accesses it normally...]]> Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:56:06 -0600