There are lots of active, vibrant developer groups in the DC area: DC PHP, Baltimore PHP, and the Frederick Web Tech group. The DC PHP Beverage Subgroup meets monthly in Northern Virginia. But in the middle between all these groups lies Montgomery County, Maryland. In that area live hundreds of developers who struggle to reach any of the developer groups in the area on a weeknight. It's time to build them something of their own.

His focus is the Montgomery County area so as not to directly take away from any of the other groups in the area people already attend. If you're interested in a group in that area, leave him a comment or hit him up on Twitter.

In this edition, I talked with Chris Tankersley a Zend PHP 5.3 Certified Engineer who has around 8-9 years programming experience in PHP. I'm impressed with his humbleness. He has not even mentioned his blog where he obviously rambles and grumbles about PHP and his projects. Chris has written a nice article on the PHP | Architect blog where he explains How To Exactly Find Where You Are Using The Yahoo PlaceFinder web service.

Other questions include:

• What's the best PHP book you've read?
• What's one PHP project you really appreciate?
• Recently Microsoft has also started actively to concentrate on PHP, any comments on that?
• If you had to go back in time, would you still choose PHP?

Check out the full post for the answers!

This group allows PHP developers at all levels of expertise get together to discuss various topics in PHP and related web technologies. Events will generally be held in Lake County, Illinois, or Kenosha County, Wisconsin.

As of the time of this post, there aren't any meetups scheduled, but there's already been signups to join the group in its future events. If you're in the area and would like to get involved, go sign up on their Meetup page to keep up to date!

Although Zagreb PHP Meetup started only 3 months ago with monthly meetups (up to 30 developers coming), our next meeting will be first meetup with organized talks. December meetup will have 5 talks with themes like 'How to write readable code?', 'Flex & PHP development' , 'Introduction to test driven development' && 'MySQL - explain explained'.

We would like to invite all interested PHP and non-PHP developers that would like to listen to some of best Croatian PHP devs (and understand Croatian language) to come on December 13th from 6PM to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 in Zagreb. Unfortunately we are limited with number of available seats so please signup at http://zgphp.eventbrite.com/.

Due to space limitations, there's only 12 seats available so hurry and reserve your spot if you'd like to attend (it's free)!

Have a user group meeting you'd like announced? Let us know!

For our "FREE" (yes, all of our meetups are free) December meetup we have a special guest, Rasmus Lerdorf, visiting to talk about "PHP in 2011". Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, will talk to us and give his perspective on the prospects of his brainchild. "PHP in 2011": A look at the state of PHP in 2011 and how it fits into the current technology stack followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn't be doing along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. This will be a 90 minute talk with an extensive Q&A session will follow.

To RSVP for the event (held at Nova Southeastern University), head to their Meetup page. There's already about 40 people signed up, so be sure and get your name in quickly to reserve your spot!

If you're a PHP user group leader (or member for that matter) and would like to have your group's upcoming meetups posted here, send us the information! We love to share!

If you're ever stuck on a problem, Google it and you'll find a swarm of users have most likely experienced the same issue and have already shared their solution. If it's not out there, ask in a public forum and people will help you find the answer. And if you've managed to solve it yourself, then write about it! That way you'll be contributing to helping others the same way others are willing to help you. That's one part of the PHP community that makes it really stand out - people share their knowledge and are more than willing to help others along their journey with PHP.

Some resources/places to meet like-minded developers include:

• StackOverflow
• Conferences like PFCongres 2011 or PHPNW 11
• Groups like PHPWomen or local user groups

The community in PHP is huge and is growing every day, and it's all about sharing. If you see someone in need and you're able to help, offer him guidance. If you see an open-source project that's great; contribute and help it grow.

Market Leader,Inc. is graciously hosting the venue for Seattle PHP Meetup in Kirkland, WA this month!! In fact, Ariz Jacinto (long-time member & frequent presenter at our Meetups), an employee of Market Leader, Inc., has gone bonkers and lined up a killer night for us all! Note the entrance and then celebrate the FREE PARKING!!

Brian Swan is a Microsoft advocate for PHP on Windows and Jesse Keating is the release engineer for Fedora Core. There's still time to RSVP on Meetup and attend this event - be sure to sign up so they know how many to expect!

PHP on IBM System i consultant ZendCon. 10gen MongoDB evangelist Steve Francia will provide an overview on using PHP with MongoDB.

You'll need to RSVP to get a spot or, if you can't make it in person, you can always watch the live stream starting at 6:30pm.

Have a user group meeting you'd like to let the community know about? Let us know!

I'm talking about people trends and community and HOW. WE. CONNECT. I decided to start old school stylie, and looked up the word 'community' in the dictionary. [...] So community literally means to give gifts to and among each other. Which in turn means my community is a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.

They go on to talk about the three key elements any good community relies on - the people that make it up, the places they meet (real or virtual) and the "things" that bring them together.

If I could make a single plea to every researcher, academic, economist and reporter it would be to stop counting us and start communicating with us. Learn more about where, why, and how our communities form, and why they're so important to us (even when they don't make us any money).

If you're not already involved in a local user group or haven't attended a conference, it's an experience completely different than sitting behind the keys, hacking day to day. PHP.net has a list of both PHP conferences and upcoming events - find one near you and make plans to attend. You'll be glad you did!

The South Florida PHP Users Group is geared toward uniting and growing the PHP community of South Florida. With monthly events in the Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and Ft. Lauderdale areas.

The group currently meets at the Revelex Corporation offices and holds their meetings on the second Wednesday of every month. The meeting for September (on the 14th at 7pm) will feature development environment tips you can use to quickly and easily get things set up. You can find complete information about the group on their meetup page (or the coming-soon Soflophp.org site).