Josh Holmes (a Microsoft Evangelist) recently gave a presentation about getting PHP applications, specifically WordPress to work better on a Windows-based platform (whether it be running on a physical server or something like Azure).

I talked about the amazing improvements in FastCGI over the past few years, the Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer (WebPI), URL Redirect, WinCache and many other things that Microsoft is doing to embrace open source technologies.

The slides for the talk are over on Slideshare but if you want something a little more engaging, check out the webcast from php|architect this coming Friday (April 9th) by Mark Brown and Ruslan Yakushev on the same subject.

Maarten Balliauw has posted about the release of a new bit of software to help you read and write from/to Microsoft PowerPoint files - PHPPowerPoint (0.1.0 CTP1).

Just like with PHPExcel, PHPPowerPoint can be used to generate PPTX files from a PHP application. This can be done by creating an in-memory presentation that consists of slides and different shapes, which can then be written to disk using a writer (of which there's currently only one for PowerPoint 2007).

Some example code is included that creates a single-slide slideshow with the PHPPowerpoint logo and the text "Thank you for using PHPPowerpoint". There's plenty of configuration options and you can place things in the slides down to the pixel. You can try out this initial release here.

If you've given any kind of technical presentation, you know that presenting code samples (clearly) can be one of the larger challenges. Matthew Weier O'Phinney has found a solution that works well for him and his slides - Highlight.

Being a technical presenter, I've often run up against the issue of how to present code snippets. The easiest route is to simply cut-and-paste into your presentation software. However, such code is basically unreadable. [...] The first trick I tried was to take screenshots of gvim. However, this had distinct downsides. [...] The next trick I tried was to use Zend Studio or Eclipse to create my screen shots.

He talks about the tool (Highlight) and its use - basically you specify the input, output and the language it needs to highlight for with more fine-tuning options like font size, line width and more. Compare this and this to the end result of Highlight here to get a feeling for how the product might look.

Haim Michael has put together a "PHP Fundamentals" class that aims to cover most of the information one might need to take the Zend Certified Engineer certification.

I am glad to announce about "PHP Fundamentals", a new course I have developed few months ago and recently completed to refine its slides and assignments. This course is available for free at www.abelski.com. This new course overviews the basic topics in PHP and reflects a practical approach for learning this language.

This post to his blog includes the PDF files for each of the sections in the course - everything from the "PHP Basics" out to "Exception Handling" and "The Standard PHP Library".

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

The International PHP Conference for 2008 happened in Mainz, Germany and had speakers on a wide range of topics. Here's just a few of the slides that have been posted so far:

Slides:

• David Parra - On Sharding Architectures
• Sebastian Bergmann - Map, Filter, Reduce - In the Small and in the Cloud, Of Lambda Functions, Closures, and Traits
• Pierre Joye/Garrett Serack - Developing PHP Internals on Windows
• Thorsten Rinne - Quality in PHP projects beyond Unittests
• Ulf Wendel - Mysqlnd Async (Sharding)
• Stefan Koopmanschap - The Power of Refactoring
• Max Horvath - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects - In-Depth Best-Practises (with Wojciech Duda), Making Selenium Test Writing easier using a DSL
• Thomas Weinert - Deliver Files with PHP, Optimizing Your Frontend Performance
• Lars Jankowfsky - Theory and practice - migrating your legacy code into our modern test driven development world
• Tobias Schlitt - Version Control with SVN, Debugging with XDebug, Database abstraction with eZ Components

Blog Posts:

• Tobias Schlitt - IPC 2008 wrapup and slides
• a wrapup from the Ibuildings blog

Keep an eye out here for more slides and blog posts as they're made...

Chris Jones has pointed out a video of a recent presentation at the Singapore PHP User Group Meeting done by Blair Layton (of Oracle Asia Pacific) on the OCI8 extension and using it to connect PHP.

While most PHP developers start off on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack there maybe a need to investigate OPAL (Oracle, PHP, Apache, Linux). This talk will discuss what Oracle offers PHP developers including operating system, database, middleware and tools support. You will find out how to take advantage of specific features in Oracle Database 11g that assist PHP developers such as Database Resident Connection Pooling with code samples and demos. An example architecture from a USA web company of a highly scalable PHP application that uses Oracle database will also be discussed.

His slides are also available for download - Set 1, Set 2 and you can watch the full video here.

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention wraps up today but some of the PHPers out there have already made some blog posts and have shared their slides from the event. Here's the list so far:

• Luke Welling - SNAP - PHP Taint Tool
• Ed Finkler - Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• Laura Thomson - Write Beautiful Code
• Wez Furlong - Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP
• Theo Schlossnagle - Full-stack Introspection Crash Course
• Ben Ramsey - Give Your Site a Boot With Memcache, OSCON 2008: Day One
• Mike Naberezny - Integration Testing PHP Applications & Supervisor as a Platform
• John Coggeshall - Top 10 Scalability Mistakes
• Andrei Zmievsky - intl me this, intl me that
• Chris Shiflett - OSCON Wrapup
• Jan Lehnardt - OSCON 2008 (wrapup)

Keep an eye out here for more slides and blog posts as they come out.

Scott MacVicar shares a helpful hint for the PHP speakers out there - how to apply syntax highlighting to the code in your slides.

I use Apple's Keynote for doing my presentations and naturally these include some bits of code that need highlighting so that it's easier to read. [...] In the end I used GESHI which is a highlight library written in PHP that supports the syntax highlighting of around 50 different programming and scripting languages.

He's provided his sample implementation to help you get up and running. You'll need to download and install GESHI to get it working though. Here's an example of the output.

On the PHP London conference website (from the recently passed PHP London 2008) has posted the first of many mp3s of the session that happened there. This first one comes from Ivo Jansch.

His presentation is titled Enterprise PHP Development and looks at things like whether or not PHP is "enterprise ready", how PHP's role in the online world has changed and some steps to take to be sure your application is ready to serve your enterprise.

The slides can be found here and the mp3 of the presentation is here.