Atlanta PHP User Group

Atlanta PHP is privileged to welcome CodeWorks to Atlanta!

CodeWorks 2009 is a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine.

CodeWorks will travel to seven locations across the United States between September 22nd and October 5th included. Each two-day event includes a day of in-depth tutorials and a day of conference talks arranged across three different tracks, all presented by the best experts in the business.

CodeWorks will be stopping in Atlanta on September 28th and 29th for a day of in-depth tutorials (the 28th) and a day of conference talks (the 29th). If PHP is your work, your passion or your hobby, CodeWorks is a great way to learn and connect with the greatest community of professionals in the world. All members of Atlanta PHP are eligible for the discounted rate of $99 (for the conference only) or $199 (for the conference + tutorials), but to get this rate, you must register by July 15th!

Atlanta PHP CodeWorks Call for Proposals

In addition, Atlanta PHP will choose one local speaker (and one alternate) to speak at CodeWorks on September 29th. Both the speaker and the alternate will receive free registration to both days of CodeWorks in Atlanta, and the alternate will speak at the October 1st Atlanta PHP meeting.

The Atlanta PHP CodeWorks CfP is open to anyone. Please e-mail submissions to proposals at atlantaphp dot org. All submissions must be received by July 20th, 11:59:59 PM EDT. Proposals will be voted on by members of Atlanta PHP, and links to vote for proposals will be sent out through the announcements list following the close of the CfP.

If you’ve never written a talk proposal but you have an idea for a talk, please check out the descriptions of talks for php|tek. These descriptions are the exact text of the proposal that the speakers sent in, and they should give you a good idea of how to write a proposal. I hope you’ll submit!

We will be taking a break in July for the July 4th holiday. We hope you’ll join us again on August 6th for our regularly scheduled meeting.

When: Thursday, May 14, 2009—6pm-10pm
Where: Microsoft Offices, Alpharetta

Announcing the Atlanta PHP TestFest event!

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest.

Aside from having to opportunity to help in improving the language itself, we will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (test) that is considered helpful receives one entry into the raffle. Furthermore, people that show they are capable of writing tests entirely on their own may be given official PHP.net accounts with direct commit access to cvs.php.net and an @php.net email address. As a result participants should also read over the general guidelines for getting CVS access.

Date: Thursday, May 14th, 2009. 6:00PM to ~10:00PM

Location: Microsoft Offices, Alpharetta (Thanks to Glen and Microsoft)

Meal: Pizza (Thanks to Glen and Microsoft)

Equipment: Mac (Intel), PC or Linux laptop (not required but recommended). Those without a supported laptop will pair program with someone who does.

Internet Access: If you do plan to bring your laptop, we need your name and company name by Wednesday 13th so we can setup you up an Internet account. (not required but recommended)

Preparation: Please install VirtualBox 2.2.2 prior to coming and reading some of the documentation to learn how it works will be helpful but not required. I’ll have Windows and Mac binaries of VirtualBox available at the event. Read the PHPT File Layout documentation. http://qa.php.net/phpt_details.php

Possible Test Subjects: To be determined by Monday the 11th. This will allow you to orient yourself with a proposed test subject if you don’t already have one in mind.

Web page with details for the event: http://www.ericstewart.org/testfest.html

We ask that you please RSVP at Meetup.com if you plan to attend.

When: Thursday, June 4, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Zend Technologies’ Offerings to the PHP Open Source Community (Edward Kietlinski)

Please join Zend Technologies (The PHP Company) at the June meeting of Atlanta PHP User Group. Edward Kietlinksi, Zend Solutions Consultant will explore the complete Zend software stack and how to optimize your efforts with PHP applications. Open source example applications like Magento eCommerce, osCommerce, Joomla, SugarCRM, Drupal, will be used to showcase how to tackle common and complex problems. Both the open source Zend stack and the advanced Professional Edition solutions will be shown to address poor performance, troubleshooting problems, identifying bottlenecks, slow databases, integrating PHP into Java, and improving MVC Zend Framework apps. Edward will also show Zend Server CE/PE, PDT/Studio, and Zend Framework. There will also be a Zend Raffle at the meeting.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, May 7, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Overview of IE8 and the Web Platform Installer

In this session, Developer Evangelist Glen Gordon will cover two recent releases from Microsoft that are of interest to PHP developers. First, we’ll look at the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer. The Platform Installer simplifies and streamlines the process of configuring IIS, installing PHP and setting up community applications like WordPress and Drupal. In this session, you’ll see the Platform Installer in action, explore the Web App Gallery, and learn how to get your own apps included in the gallery. Next, we’ll take a look at the recently released Internet Explorer 8. We’ll see how both developers and users benefit from improved standards-based rendering, and how developers can ensure that their sites will render properly for users using IE8. We’ll also cover how to take advantage of IE8’s new end user productivity features like Accelerators, Web Slices and search providers.

Glen will be bringing some trial software and giveaways to the meeting, so come get some goodies!

Glen is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft. His job is to ensure developers have the tools, information and resources they need to be successful implementing solutions that involve Microsoft technologies. You can reach Glen through his blog at http://glengordon.name/.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

Atlanta PHP has moved their forums, discussion lists, and announcements list to Google Groups!

If you wish to be counted as a member of Atlanta PHP and receive all notifications of meetings, please join the announcements Google Group.

To take part in discussions, ask any PHP help questions, or take part in planning Atlanta PHP events, please join the general discussion Google Group.

We will no longer send announcements through Meetup.com or Facebook (we will still schedule our meetings on Meetup.com, but we won’t use the Meetup.com mailing list to send out announcements; we will no longer schedule meetings on Facebook).

Thank you for bearing with us during this change.

-Your Atlanta PHP organizers (Ben, Chris, and Kevin)

When: Thursday, April 2, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: IBM’s Offerings to the Open Source Community (Matt Stobo)

With the pendulum continually swinging between computing on the client and computing on the server companies like IBM must stay innovative to remain competitive and develop innovative solutions to help their clients innovate in order to compete. People think of Big Blue as mainframes, proprietary software, and robust, but heavy application servers. With the pendulum now in the space of fatter clients and lighter servers what does IBM have to offer in this seemingly unfamiliar territory where open source, WEB 2.0, and LAMP reign. In this presentation we will discuss some of IBM’s offerings in this space and how they can be used to help you compete.

Matt Stobo is a Senior IT Specialist with IBM, where he focuses primarily on the WebSphere brand of products. He works with and advises many fortune 100 companies on their WebSphere environments. He has presented at the WebSphere Technical Exchange and has published articles on IBM’s Developerworks.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, March 5, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Rapid Application Development with ModelBaker

Jonathan Freeman, creator of ModelBaker will present how to build a web application in a few minutes with ModelBaker, a rapid application development tool designed around the novice and agile PHP developer. Without any programming, we will create a web application from scratch that will automatically generate a complete MVC framework along with a newly created database, relationships, models, controllers, views, css and javascript. We will then enable an iPhone & iPod touch version of our web application for our mobile users.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, February 5, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: PHP & Apache: Why httpd.conf Is Your New BFF!

Apache’s configuration files can be used to configure how Apache operates, but they can also be used to configure PHP and how Apache httpd interacts with PHP. In this talk, Jeff Jones explains the different ways Apache can be configured, explains many of the useful config options available for Apache modules, including our own mod_php, and showcases example of how they can be used with, and instead of, your PHP code.

Mini-topic: Design Patterns: The Registry Pattern

Each month, we’ll take a look at a different design pattern, exploring why you might want to use it, and showing how to implement it in PHP.

This month, we’ll explore the Registry Pattern with Ben Ramsey.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.

When: Thursday, January 8, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Around the PHP Community

For new and veteran PHP programmers alike, it’s often difficult to find the right place to ask questions and find the best answers and solutions to programming challenges. This month, Ben Ramsey takes us on a journey through the PHP Community to discover the websites the experts use to get PHP news and information and the places they go to ask for help (because even experts need help). He’ll wrap up the talk with a brief who’s who in the PHP Community, introducing you to some of the core developers and familiar faces around the community.

Mini-topic: Design Patterns: The Factory Pattern

Each month, we’ll take a look at a different design pattern, exploring why you might want to use it, and showing how to implement it in PHP.

This month, we’ll explore the Factory Pattern with Brian DeShong.

Location

Our meeting takes place at the Consulate General of Canada at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions. You will need to see the concierge in order to gain access to the 17th floor.