Miro Svrtan has a recent post to his site talking about the first ever PHP meetup that happened in Belgrade in at the end of April organized by the PHP Srbija community.

With gathering of more then 250 developers this proved to be a much needed event there and congratulations to organizers for doing it. As a organizer of similar (but much smaller) PHP community in Zagreb I was in constant contact with organizers and was very happy when we were invited to join them on this occasion, especially when they approved my proposal to talk about Laravel4 there.

Even the local media picked up on the meeting and a larger venue had to be found at the last minute due to the overwhelming response. There were a few different topics mentioned (including BDD, a questionnaire, best practices in component libraries and web security) before getting to the main talk.

I would take this opportunity to thank whole PHP Srbija organization committee for inviting us & once again congratulate them on bringing such a large community together.

The /Dev/Hell podcast, as hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode 28, "Canadian Twinkie Smuggler".

You can blame Chris's tomfoolery for how crappy he sounds, because his computer pooped all over himself and he had to call in on his iPhone. Nevertheless, we were able to discuss in detail the smuggling of mass-produced pastries of the Twinkie and Tastykake varieties. We also get framework security in the context of recent Rails vulnerabilities, and how PHP developers seem to have a heightened awareness of potential vulnerabilities. Ed's details his experiences starting a local user group, and then discusses his efforts to speak at developer/tech conferences about his struggles with mental illness.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to their feed and getting this and other recent episodes.

In a recent post Miro Svrtan talks about a PHP developer community he started up in the Zagreb, Croatia area, the ZgPHP user group, and some of the lessons he learned in the process.

The year 2011 was a great success for developer communities in Zagreb. Although mobile developers started in 2010 with Mobile Monday, web developers were a bit shy and Ruby developers started first, then python meetups started and in the summer few people urged/pushed me to start organizing PHP Meetups. Besides colleagues I did not know a lot of PHP developers so I needed to spread the word about it. Twitter was the first step and it paid off. With only a few retweets there were already 10-20 people interested.

The post talks about the growth of the group, things they wish they'd done better (like involving local companies) and their work to create a custom logo for the group. If you're in the area and want to find out more about the group, check out their main page.

As mentioned by Phil Sturgeon, the London Codeigniter Meetup has come back and will be meeting at the end of this month (April 30th).

This month, since it's their first meeting, it's just a "networking" type of event:

Meeting in a pub, talking about our experience with CI, development in general, and networking.

The meeting is happening in London at 8pm on Monday, April 30th. For more information, check out this event over on Meetup.com.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog today about an effort that's underway to get a Banglore-area PHP developer user group started up:

The purpose of this meet is to share knowledge with the community, discuss issues you're facing with others in the same field and help you network with other PHP professionals. This is not a one-off event, but we're planning on making this a regular event. We haven't really finalized the frequency of the events, but you can let us know of your preferences when you meet up with us this month.

A Meetup Group has already been started for the effort and they're in the process of trying to locate a good place to hold the meeting. Right now, the meetup is scheduled for the end of October, so if you're interested join the group and let them know your opinion on the location and their list of suggested talks.

A new post to the Zend Developer Zone from Jayson Minard talks about some of the upcoming PHP-related events in the Vancouver, B.C. area:

In Vancouver, BC we are ramping up the PHP events and getting more focused content going here in town

He mentions three events - a Vancouver-area LAMP/LAPP meetup, a Drupal meeting and a workshop he'll be speaking at, the WorkSpace B3 Series.

The Zend Developer Zone has a reminder for those in the Amsterdam area - the phpGG user group (newly formed) will be having their next meeting on September 23rd.

On Tuesday 23 September 2008 the Dutch PHP user group will have its first meeting, in what will become a bi-monthly event. The goal is have meetings with other members, enjoy some coffee and tea and meeting other developers and the chance of prizes to win.

Two speakers will be presenting from about 8pm to 10:30pm - you can find out more about the group and the meeting from their site, including how to get there.

Those PHP developers that live around the Columbia, MD area might want to drop in to the PHP user group meeting that Theo Schlossnagle mentions on his blog today:

Just a friendly reminder that we'll be having our first meetup [on 05.14.2008] as planned. I thought as a good kick-off we could all collaboratively share what we do with PostgreSQL. We'll start off with a whirlwind tour of how OmniTI uses PotsgreSQL, taking a brief look at ZFS, DTrace and large datasets.

The event will be happening here and will start at about 6:30pm.

Mike Lively has made the announcement that the Las Vegas area finally has its own user group:

I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas finally has a PHP User Group and our first meeting is...tomorrow. I am pretty excited as I know there is a fairly decent size PHP programmer community in LV, it just hasn't been organized yet.

Their meeting is later today (April 11th) at 4pm at PT's Pub east of I15 and south of 215. It's an "anything goes" sort of even so expect to come, socialize and meet up with lots of great developers from the area.

If you're going to be in the San Francisco area on March 6th this year and are a Zend Framework fan, be sure not to miss the traveling roadshow Zend will be doing at the SF PHP Meetup.

Wil Sinclair and Brad Cottel of the Zend Framework team will bring their unique brand of wacky antics, PHP-fu and in-depth knowledge of all things Zend Framework to the SF PHP Meetup this month as they present "Zend Framework 1.5: New Features".

They'll be showing off the latest and greatest that the Framework has to offer. If you'd like to check it all out, find out all the details on the SF PHP Meetup page.