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, 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, December 4, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Setting Up Online Training with Moodle

Kevin Roberts will present how to set up an online training system using Moodle—an open source PHP application that provides pretty much everything you need for a self-serve training environment. Moodle has a huge and vibrant development community. We will also install a community-provided module that takes the grief out of scheduling one-on-one remote training sessions.

From the Moodle web site: Moodle is a course management system (CMS)—a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Mini-topic: Design Patterns: The Singleton Pattern

Ben Ramsey revives our monthly mini-topic presentation by introducing a new series on design patterns. 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 take a look at the Singleton Pattern.

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, November 6, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

November Topic: Got a problem? We’ve got answers!

Got a bug that’s been nagging you for hours? How about a feature that you just can’t seem to implement? This month at Atlanta PHP, we’re diverging from our usual presentation format and opening the floor for a “round table” discussion about development problems you are facing.

So, feel free to bring your coding problems to us, and as a group, we’ll come up with the solutions. Bring your laptop or a thumb drive containing snippets/samples of your code or application, so we can look at it as a group. This is sure to be a learning experience for us all.

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.

PHP Basics at the Atlanta Web Design Group Meetup on November 11

On November 11 at 7:00pm, Matthew Turland will speak to the Atlanta Web Design Group about PHP, covering basics of the language and best practices from a designer’s perspective. This will include basic output, variables, conditional branches, loops, output modularization using includes, coding style, and escaping output for security purposes.

Matthew is the Lead Programmer for a Web application service provider, is Zend PHP Certified, and works with PHP and MySQL on a daily basis. He’s also a member of the PHP Community organization and serves as an organizer for the Acadiana Open Source Group. You can also read his blog at http://ishouldbecoding.com/.

There will be a 30-40 minute presentation followed by Q&A and discussion.

You must RSVP at Meetup.com for this meeting.

php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta November 12-14!

Atlanta PHP invites you to join us at php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta, GA November 12 through 14!

Atlanta PHP user group members receive $100 off the price of registration!

The publishers of php|architect and Python Magazine, are proud to invite you to php|works and PyWorks, two great conferences that will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA, between November 12 and November 14.

With over 65 talks in 5 tracks, 10 tutorials and great networking events and parties, php|works and PyWorks represent a unique opportunity to not only hone your technical skills, but also meet and interact with members of a vibrant community of developers from all walks of life. And remember—your attendance fee covers access to both conferences!

Due to the gas shortage in Atlanta, Atlanta PHP has decided to cancel its regularly scheduled October meeting. We apologize for the short notice, but we felt this was the right decision to make given the current situation.

We will resume our regularly scheduled meetings on Thursday, November 6th. We hope to see you there!

Now, for a few announcements:

BarCamp is returning to Atlanta this year. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. BarCamp Atlanta will take place on October 17-18, 2008 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia Tech ATDC in Midtown. There is only space for 300 participants, so be sure to sign up early!

Atlanta PHP invites you to join us at php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta, GA November 12 through 14!

Atlanta PHP user group members receive $100 off the price of registration!

The publishers of php|architect and Python Magazine, are proud to invite you to php|works and PyWorks, two great conferences that will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA, between November 12 and November 14.

With over 65 talks in 5 tracks, 10 tutorials and great networking events and parties, php|works and PyWorks represent a unique opportunity to not only hone your technical skills, but also meet and interact with members of a vibrant community of developers from all walks of life. And remember—your attendance fee covers access to both conferences!