The PHPNW conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and is a day-long even packed with great speakers and now a great panel discussion too. You can still register for your tickets on the conference website.
Jamie Hemmett has a few suggestions for local user groups out there on what to do and not to do to help make their group successful. Some of it was gathered from personal experience, other tips from the recent user group panel discussion from this year's ZendCon.
I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).
Some of the observations/comments she mentions include:
Freelancing PHP developers may not feel like attending a group with "the competition"
Several factors dissuade developers from attending (distance, confusing schedules, timing)
Some ideas that groups out there could use to attract and keep more members
Why the groups can make you a better developer
and some sponsorship/promotion ideas to help grow and better the group
This is a great post packed with some good suggestions and observations. If you're involved at all in your local group (or would like to be) be sure to read it.
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 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.
The Zend Developer Zone has posted a recording (from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2008) of the UnConference session user group panel discussion.
Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.
You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.
Mark Kimsal has posted part one of a new series he's working up on creating a virtual host control panel by pairing with PHP a few other technologies.
I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.
He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.
I've been told that MIX has sold out and that there is a lot of interest in our slot, so I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about, but I'm looking for questions to break the ice and get things rolling.
If you know a little bit about the topic and would like to help out with questions of your own, send them along to Wez via email - wez@php.net.
According to the new post on the Symfony blog, they re-released something Symfony users have been asking for ever since it went away - the Symfony control panel.
We recently removed the control panel script from the trunk. [...] This script is now back as a plugin, and called sfControlPanelPlugin. It's been improved a bit, and now contains a better code browser, a better task executer, a new configuration explorer, and a data explorer that allows browsing data contained in the project's database. We also harmonized its look and feel with the symfony default pages. Check it out and try it, you might never use the CLI again...
Christian Wenz, back from the php/db|works conference and at a break following the conference, has posted some of his thoughts about this years conference over on his blog.
My schedule was crammed right after php|works 2006, so I could not find an earlier possibility to blog. Anyway, the extended entry contains my short report on php|arch's second conference this year.
He talks about some sightseeing before-hand, Tutorial Day, XML Security demos, Unicode in PHP6, a "slight problem" concerning his laptop, and his role on the Zend PHP5 Certification Panel. Check out the full entry for all of the details and "expect a separate blog entry later" on his experience on the panel.
