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

In this quick post on the Ibuildings blog Ivo Jansch (CTO of Ibuildings) looks ahead to the upcoming PHPNW conference (Nov 22nd) and their participation in it.

The conference features speakers such as Derick Rethans and Rob Allen (see the schedule for more speakers), and at 50 GBP it's very good value for money for PHP developers. [...] We're also sending a bunch of our developers there, and we have a booth, so if you want to meet us or land a cool job, come talk to us at the conference.

The PHPNW conference will be held November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and has several exciting things going for it - a great list of speakers, a recently announced panel discussion on the state of the PHP community and a free one year subscription to every attendee for php|architect magazine.

The PHPNW conference crew have just announced a newly added session to finish off the conference day - a panel discussion about the current state of the PHP community.

This will be a panel discussion on the topic "State of the Community" and will bring together some of the leading lights of the community to discuss the PHP community as a whole, how people can get involved, and how the community relates to PHP as a day job. If there's a question you'd like to see the panel answer, please post it in the comments below and we'll include as many as we can!

The conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and there's still spots open if you'd like to attend.

Lorna Mitchell notes that PHPNW tickets are on sale and can be purchased on the PHPNW conference website.

This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets are priced at a very reasonable and credit-crunch-friendly £50 (with discounts for students and OAPs).

The PHPNW conference is happening November 22nd and includes talks from speakers like Rob Allen, Derick Rethans and Adrian Hardy.