For those that weren't able to make it, Sebastian Bergmann has posted a short summary of what went on at the Dutch PHP usergroup's TestFest 2008 event.

I arrived shortly after noon, just in time for the start of the test fest at 12:30. After a short introduction to PHPT, we started writing tests for the Reflection API. We managed to write 37 tests with 10 people in 4 hours.

You can find out more about the user group on their website including meeting times, locations and links to other great PHP resources.

Doug Hill has decided to start a series on his blog that details some of the happenings in the PHP community for the past week, of which this is the first:

I spend way too much time reading blogs, surfing PHP and web development articles online. I resolve to cut back but things just sneak back into my reader somehow, and believe me dzone doesn't help. But I've came up with a way to justify all that time, I call it research.

He mentions things like the infamous CIO article, Zend's Jolt Award, comparing the Zend Framework versus PEAR and PHP releases, books and various other language-related tidbits.

Check out the post for more and keep an eye on Doug's blog for future weekly summaries.

Kathy Ried has posted about some of her experience (including being a speaker) at this year's BarCampMelbourne 2008:

BarCampMelbourne2008 was, simply put, AWESOME! BarCampMelbourne2008 was held at Thoughtworks [wikipedia] at 155 Queen Street, Melbourne on 23 Feb 08, and had approximately 60 in attendance.

She talks not only about the conference itself (the male vs female attendance, the presence of Apple laptops and the age of attendees) as well as her talk on the advancement of practices at her workplace and other talks like an intro to APhpLix and how to use PHP Under Control.

David Goodwin has posted a book review of a book put out by Packt Publishing, "Object Oriented Programming with PHP5" (from Hasin Hayder).

After an email out of the blue from someone at Packt publishing, here's a review of "Object-Orientated Programming with PHP5" I don't think I've done a book review before, so apologies in advance if it's not structured in any logical manner.

He's broken it up into a few lists to make it very straight forward and easy to see if it's the book for you - the pros, the cons, the contents of the book and a random code sample (this one showing the Decorator pattern in action).

For those that weren't able to attend this year's CakeFest (2008), you might want to check out Felix Geisendorfer's summary of the event that happened in early February down in Orlando, Florida - complete with lots of pictures.

Since I'm not much of a story teller I'll make this a picture post (my hosting company should really re-think that unlimited bandwidth package, haha).

He has shots of several of the attendees (including names known to most of the CakePHP community), the location for the conference, shots of the "off time" during the conference and some alligator kissing.

I just want to say thank you to all of the folks who came and especially those who have been involved with the logistics of all of this. It was a pleasure to meet everybody and I’m looking forward to the next CakeFest in Argentina.

On the PHP Coding Practices blog, Tim Koschuetzki has posted his wrapup of the very first (of many, I'm sure) CakeFest conferences that wrapped up at the beginning of this month (Feb 2008):

I would like to tell you about the first CakeFest we had from February 6th till February 8th in Orlando / Florida. I attended the conference which was dedicated to CakePHP [...] There were a few nice talks as well.

He mentions talks by Garrett Woodworth, his own talk about what's new in CakePHP 1.2, Nate Abele's look at REST interfaces and a talk from Felix Geisendorfer dealing with the CakePHP/jQuery combination.