The QaFoo group has announced a giveaway they're doing of a ticket to this year's PHP Unconference Europe:

PHP Unconference Europe is an amazing PHP community meet-up. We would love to help you experience this event and therefore raffle 2 x 1 ticket (viable for non-german as well as german participants). In order to take part in the raffle, just complete the following sentence in a Tweet: "PHP quality is … /cc @qafoo". Replace the "…" with something that you consider important for software quality in your PHP projects and CC our Twitter account (required).

If you haven't heard about the PHP Unfonference Europe, it's a yearly unconference style community event where the participants set out the schedule based on who wants to present and what they want to hear when the event starts. It's less about formal presentations and more about discussion and and "experience sharing." It will be happening May 4th and 5th in Manchester, UK.

On The Bakery they've officially announced CakeFest 2012, happening in Manchester, UK from August 30th through September 2nd (some days are conference sessions, others are training).

CakeFest is the annual CakePHP Conference. It brings together developers, users, and interested parties from all over the world for a four day event filled with workshops, talks, dinners, social events and plenty of fun! If you are interested in giving a talk at CakeFest, we still have submissions open! Just head over to the CakeFest, sign up and submit your talk proposal via your account page! We're open to anyone for submissions, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can also purchase tickets to this year's event (with a discount for students) ranging from $420 USD for just the conference out to $950 for the conference + tutorial days. They'll have talks from core CakePHP developers, time for lightening talks and a panel discussion where you can ask your own questions of the Core development team. You can get complete details about this event on the conference website.

In a new post to his blog today Philip Norton has made his announcement about this year's PHP North West Conference 2011 happening October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK.

I have attended the last 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been of a very high standard in virtually every way. [...] The conference will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be lots of coffee breaks and there is usually a free bar in the evening of the Saturday.

Tickets aren't on sale yet for the event, but it shouldn't be too long before the Early Bird pricing is announced. Potential sponsors can find more information here and you can keep up with the latest by following @phpnw11 on Twitter.

Rob Allen has shared a bit of code he's put together to help with validating UK postal codes (since the functionality in Zend_Validate doesn't cooperate), so he extended the main Zend_Validate_PostCode with his own validator.

It's easy enough to add a filter to remove the space, but I'm a little worried that when (and if) it gets fixed, will the fixed version Zend_Validate_PostCode then fail to validate postcodes without the space? In theory it should as the space is part of the spec. I'd hate my code to unexpectedly break due to a valid bug fix. I can easy work around this worry though by simply creating my own extension of Zend_Validate_PostCode.

The thirty-five line code example allows you to correctly validate the postal code with a quick call to the "isValid" method. He also links to another method from Paul Court to handle things similarly.

Stuart Herbert has a new post about a new user group starting up in southwest UK:

London and the North West of the UK have their own successful PHP user groups...and it's time we had one here in the South West :) I've setup a PHP SW group on Google to get us started, and we're already talking about where (probably the centre of Bristol) and when to have our first meet-up. Why not join the group and the discussion?

There's already a first discussion going about the meeting location with plenty of suggestions. If you're in the area and are interested in attending, check out this Google group for more info.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell mentions the Leeds PHP user group that's "sprung up" and is gaining traction in the area.

So far it has met twice and its been a good crowd both times. Our meetings at the moment are at Brewery Tap, which is not only the closest pub to the train station in Leeds, it's also got some great beers!

The meetings are on the third Monday of each month and next up (on August 16th) is Ben Waine talking about XDebug. You can find out the latest on the group on their site and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates.

A new CodeIgniter-related conference has been announced today - CodeIgniter Con 2010 happening in Bristol UK in August.

CodeIgniter Con 2010 is the first CodeIgniter-only conference to be held in Bristol, UK. CodeIgniter Con 2010 was created to have an event for all CI developers to further their development knowledge, network with each other and have a great time. CodeIgniter Con 2010 tickets are now available for purchase.

The two day conference includes speakers like Adam Griffiths, Phil Sturgeon, Joel Gascoigne and Dean Howe with topics ranging from using CodeIgniter in social networks to some tips on running an open source project that uses the framework. Tickets are already on sale and cost £20 for the conference day ticket and £10 for just the Hack Day ticket.

Derick Rethans, indulging his "map geek" side, has written up a new post showing how he took the data from Ordnance Survey and mapped some information in the UK - postcode density for the whole area.

I decided to map all the postcodes onto the UK map where more postcodes for a specific place would create a "lighter" colour. Each postcode has on average about 15 addresses, so in more densely populated areas you have more "postcodes-per-area". Doing this wasn't very difficult and it resulted in the following map.

He walks through the entire process including how, in working with the data, he noticed alignment issues caused by the differing projections the map information service uses (Mercator) versus just mapping to a flat image. Some calculations were made to convert the latitude/longitude to the correct locations and the resulting points were plotted on a cut-out image of the UK.

After I figured out all the maths for this, the only problem that remains that implementing those algorithms in PHP is show-calculating all the positions from the 1.6 million postcode locations takes up to 10 minutes. This is why I am not presenting any code yet. I am planning to implement all the necessary calculations in a PHP extension to speed up the calculations.