The QaFoo group has announced a giveaway they're doing of a ticket to this year's PHP Unconference Europe:

PHP Unconference Europe is an amazing PHP community meet-up. We would love to help you experience this event and therefore raffle 2 x 1 ticket (viable for non-german as well as german participants). In order to take part in the raffle, just complete the following sentence in a Tweet: "PHP quality is … /cc @qafoo". Replace the "…" with something that you consider important for software quality in your PHP projects and CC our Twitter account (required).

If you haven't heard about the PHP Unfonference Europe, it's a yearly unconference style community event where the participants set out the schedule based on who wants to present and what they want to hear when the event starts. It's less about formal presentations and more about discussion and and "experience sharing." It will be happening May 4th and 5th in Manchester, UK.

On The Bakery they've officially announced CakeFest 2012, happening in Manchester, UK from August 30th through September 2nd (some days are conference sessions, others are training).

CakeFest is the annual CakePHP Conference. It brings together developers, users, and interested parties from all over the world for a four day event filled with workshops, talks, dinners, social events and plenty of fun! If you are interested in giving a talk at CakeFest, we still have submissions open! Just head over to the CakeFest, sign up and submit your talk proposal via your account page! We're open to anyone for submissions, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can also purchase tickets to this year's event (with a discount for students) ranging from $420 USD for just the conference out to $950 for the conference + tutorial days. They'll have talks from core CakePHP developers, time for lightening talks and a panel discussion where you can ask your own questions of the Core development team. You can get complete details about this event on the conference website.

The PHP North West user group has announced their latest meetup happening April 3rd at 7pm in Manchester. Derick Rethans will be speaking about designing MongoDB schemas.

One of the challenges that comes with moving to MongoDB is figuring how to best model your data. While most developers have internalized the rules of thumb for designing schemas for RDBMSs, these rules don't always apply to MongoDB. The simple fact that documents can represent rich, schema-free data structures means that we have a lot of viable alternatives to the standard, normalized, relational model. Not only that, MongoDB has several unique features, such as atomic updates and indexed array keys, that greatly influence the kinds of schemas that make sense.

For more information, check out their event page, complete with details about the venue and maps to the location.

Have a user group meeting coming up you'd like to announce? let us know!

In a new post to his blog today Philip Norton has made his announcement about this year's PHP North West Conference 2011 happening October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK.

I have attended the last 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been of a very high standard in virtually every way. [...] The conference will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be lots of coffee breaks and there is usually a free bar in the evening of the Saturday.

Tickets aren't on sale yet for the event, but it shouldn't be too long before the Early Bird pricing is announced. Potential sponsors can find more information here and you can keep up with the latest by following @phpnw11 on Twitter.

Ben Longden has a new post announcing a TestFest happening in September put on by the PHPNW group.

I am very pleased to announce this years PHPNW TestFest over at MadLab in Manchester. The event will take place on Saturday 11th September from 12pm until sometime around 5-6pm. Lunch will be provided (courtesy of our sponsor, Ibuildings), and I daresay we may wish to make an bit of an evening of it at a local bar...

You can find full details on the event on the PHP.net wiki as well as register if you have interest in attending. The even will happening Saturday, September 11th from 12pm until around 5-6pm.

Following up on the previous announcement about the date for the PHP North West conference, Lorna Mitchell has posted some more specific information to her blog:

Last night at the PHPNW user group we announced this year's conference - PHPNW09. We don't have a lot of detail but here is a run-down of all the information I have.

The conference will be held at the Manchester Conference Center this year (changed from last year) with the (currently) estimated pricing for Early Bird tickets coming in at 50 GBP (+VAT) until September 10th.

Keep an eye on the conference's main website for more information as it becomes available.

On the IBuildings blog there's a new post by Soila Patajoki taking a brief look at TestFest events around the world.

The PHP TestFest is a gathering by PHP enthusiasts that get together to write automated test cases for PHP. These test cases help prevent future incompatibilities and bugs in PHP. The event has grown global over the course of the years, with user groups everywhere in the world participating.

She points out some of the European TestFest events that Ibuildings is helping out with including ones in London, Manchester and Belgium. You can find out more about TestFest-ing and see if there's a group in your area participating on the TestFest page off the main PHP QA site.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell talks a bit about the upcoming TestFest event happening in Manchester next weekend and what she's learned about testing PHP to make things flow a bit smoother for her while there (and you, should you want to write tests in the future).

In preparation I decided it was high time to sit down and figure out what testing PHP is all about. People kept telling me it was easy but I had no clear picture of how all the pieces went together - there are different ways of doing the same thing and although I have been keen to get involved with testing for some time, I haven't been able to get started until now.

She looks at the automated tests as a part of the build ("make test") and some of the screens from the lcov testing results. She also recommends reading up on the phpt documentation to help you get going.

The PHPNW user group (based out of Manchester, United Kingdom) will be taking part in this year's PHP TestFest, an event to encourage more complete code coverage of the PHP language through user-contributed phpt tests. Lorna Mitchell has more about their involvement in this recent post to her blog.

Our event will be on 9th May - you can sign up to attend (limited places so do let us know) on the upcoming page for this event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2299548/. The idea behind Test Fest is twofold: firstly, to give an approachable way for PHP developers to contribute back to the core - we'll learn how to write tests on the day and can continue to do so after the event of course! Secondly, PHP itself gets better tests, and the language itself gets better. All in all, I can't see a reason not to do it!

If you're not in the area of Manchester (or even in the same country) you still might have a group near you participating - check out this page on the PHP.net wiki to find one close (ten countries are represented so far).

The first annual PHP North West conference happened this past Saturday (Nov 22, 2008) and was a great success. Over 150 attendees made it for the day long event, large groups of which came to the social events as well. Here's some of the slides and wrapups posted by speakers and attendees alike:

Blog Posts

• Lorna Mitchell's PHPNW Post-match Analysis
• Stefan Koopmanschap's look back
• David Goodwin's summary of the event
• Rob Allen's look at the conference

Slides

• The Power of Refactoring by Stefan Koopmanschap