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.

Lorna Mitchell has posted about her own experiences at her local TestFest as hosted by the PHP North West group in Manchester.

Yesterday saw the PHP North West User Group hold their first Test Fest in Manchester. As a relatively young user group (at less than a year old) with not a single @php.net email address between us, this was an ambitious venture. Scott MacVicar very kindly offered to come and be our mentor - to show us around PHP and get us started writing tests, and in fact he did very well and everyone was able to begin quite quickly.

She mentions the fourteen attendees, eighty-four tests created and the encouragement it gave for those developers to write even more. You can see photos taken at the event here.

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).