Atlanta PHP User Group

When: Thursday, May 1, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Topic: TestFest 2008

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt 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.

The Atlanta PHP May meeting will be dedicated to TestFest 2008, introducing the concept of phpt tests and how to write them.

Mini-Talk: Easy Loader Generation

We’ve all seen those nifty animated loading images on Ajaxified Web 2.0 sites, but how do we create them? Eric Stewart shows us how with “a neat little tool for making a quick little AJAX loading gif.”

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.

Yesterday, php.net announced the TestFest!

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. 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. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

As a preview for our May 1st meeting, we will have a workshop format catering to two different groups of developers. For beginning PHP developers, we will help you get started developing PHP applications by helping to set up your environment and teaching a few of the basics. For intermediate-to-advanced developers, we will discuss how you can assist the PHP development community by writing phpt tests. More details to come in the future.

Discuss phpt tests and the TestFest in the Atlanta PHP forum.