If you've wanted to get involved in a PHP user group but either don't have one in your area or travel so much it makes it impractical, there's a new group that might interest you - Nomad PHP. It's a virtual user group that you can attend. It's still in the beginning stages, but you can express your interest and get more details as they come.

Tired of seeing all the great speakers other PHP User Groups are hearing and lamenting that there is no group near you? Nomad PHP User Group is just for you. We meet on-line, so you can participate wherever you are [and] will have well known as well as brand new speakers. You'll also get access to the recordings to review later.

They point out that this isn't intended as a replacement for a local user group if you have one - interaction with peers and being a part of the community is still important. This is just an alternative. If this sounds interesting, head over and enter your information to be contacted with more info about the group.

If you're a developer and have considered getting out there and sharing your knowledge (via public speaking) but don't know where to start, you should check out the latest Day Camp 4 Developers happening this Friday (March 22nd).

Have you ever needed to give a presentation to your local user group? Do you need to present a topic to your team? Have you ever wanted to speak at a technical conference? If you answered yes to at least one of those questions then we are presenting Day Camp 4 Developers #5: Public Speaking for Developers just for you. We have selected 4 presenters that we feel are great at presenting technical topics. Each of them is a developer, each of them has a history of public speaking, and each of them has agreed to share what they have learned over the years.

This edition includes talks from some of the top well-known PHP community speakers:

• Laura Thomson of Mozilla
• Lorna Jane Mitchell
• Elizabeth Naramore from Github
• Keith Casey of Twilio

It's an online day-long event so you can participate from wherever you're at. You can still pick up tickets for the event from the main site - $40 USD for a single ticket, $100 USD for an "office party"

James Fuller has posted a review of the online code editing tool Cloud9 and how well it works for his PHP development.

At first I though Cloud9 would be a simple editor, perhaps a nice showcase of what you can do with HTML5 and some well-written javascript but it quickly became evident that this app was packing a lot of powerful features. [...] Sounds pretty awesome if you think about it. You can even connect you own server via SSH instead of using the build in sandbox (this is a paid feature). Is this the Holy-Grail? Not Really, but it's close. This is a very exciting product that almost reaches holy-grail status, but it falls short in a few key areas.

He includes a little bit about trying to use PHP 5.5 in the Cloud9 editing, and points out that while he was (eventually) able to get the PHP 5.5 alpha compiled, he wasn't able to get things like memcache compiled and working.

The Cloud9 team has done a great job removing the barriers to getting a simple idea out the door. I implemented FizzBuzz in PHP using Composer, PHPUnit, and some SPL interfaces and got it all done , and posted to GitHub in about an hour.

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has posted a quick note about the Symfony Live Paris 2012 session videos being available online for free.

During SymfonyLive Paris 2012, we recorded all the sessions that were delivered in the two main rooms. That's a total of more than 15 hours of Symfony and PHP goodness. We promised a free access to all attendees, but we have decided to provide all the videos for free and for everyone. So, if you were not able to join us in Paris, this is a unique opportunity to watch all the great sessions we had.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Realtime Web Apps with WebSockets
• Using MongoDB responsibly
• Advanced Service Container Utilization
• Advanced Silex
• Decoupling Content Management with Create and PHPCR
• ORMs don't kill your database, developers do!

On NetTuts.com there's a tutorial showing you how to use the GoCardless service to accept payments on your site (in the UK, unlike some other online payment services).

Online payments are increasingly becoming more and more popular. GoCardless is yet another payment service, which currently works in the UK, allowing you to accept payments online.

Most of the tutorial is used to explain what the service is, getting you set up with an account (complete with screenshots) and how you can work with their API via an SSL connection. Included are examples of this using their PHP Library and what the results look like in their interface.

Klaus Silveira has submitted a project he's come up with to help PHP developers detect problems in their code via a web-based application - PHPHint.org.

PHPHint is a community-driven, quick and easy to use, online tool that analyzes your PHP code and looks for potential errors, lack of best practices and code smell. It also allows you to clean your code automagically.

It was created to spread the work about the PSR standards and the PHP-FIG group, the importance of getting rid of code smell and applying to standards.

Since it is an open source project, you can help contribute if you'd like to see improvements to the service. It's great that it takes the relatively new PSR standards (PSR-1 & PSR-2) into account when analyzing the code too.

In this recent post to Reddit.com, the question is asked "Where can I find a free place to edit PHP code and see the results?"

Hey everyone, Recently I was tasked with coming up with some code for an possible job opportunity. I'm wondering if anyone could point me to a place where I can easily write and edit PHP code and see the actual program run.

Suggestions from the comments include:

• Codepad.org
• Ideone.com
• The built-in webserver for PHP 5.4.x
• Ignite.io

On the LearnComputer.com site there's a new post comparing the benefits/downfalls of online versus classroom learning of PHP development. They list a few advantages and disadvantages of each.

There can be many factors in the decision to learn PHP online or to take a class in-person, and for some, this can be a difficult decision to make. This article discusses the pros and cons of each method of PHP training to help you find the learning method that is going to suit your needs best. PHP isn't a new programming language, and there is a wealth of information on it on the web for every level of proficiency. The question is whether these resources alone are sufficient to get you up-and-running with PHP quickly.

For the "online" section advantages include flexible schedules and more up to date content. The disadvantages are things like a prerequisite knowledge of using computers/the training software and that the instructor might only have "set hours" to answer questions and offer help. The "classroom" option advantages include the motivation of a regular meeting time and fewer technology hurdles to overcome. Disadvantages include the need for a time/in-person commitment and that the focus might be higher level than needed to appeal to a more mass audience.

John Conde has shared his multi-part guide to getting your application integrated with the popular payment service Authorize.net.

As an Authorize.Net blogger, I decided to write a series of articles that outlined not only the basics of handling an ecommerce transaction, but also included some best practices as well. These were demonstrated using a web-based payment form that when complete forms a real-world, production ready solution. Since there was a lot of ground to cover, I broke the tutorial into eleven parts.

Parts of the series cover topics like:

• reading/sanitizing data
• handling validation errors
• preventing duplicate submissions
• preventing automated form submissions

For those that want to jump straight into the code, he also links to his sample payment form and the Authorize.net PHP SDK.

The PHP documentation team has made a new announcement about some major changes that are happening with the PHP documentation - three interesting new additions to this part of the PHP project.

PHP has several [three] new documentation features that the community should be aware of.

They've introduced the following:

• PHP manual pages (man pages) - pman - installed via PEAR
• An enhanced CHM (Windows help) version of the manual with user notes
• The Online Documentation Editor allowing edits from anyone.