Contest: Free ZendCon Passes for User Groups!.

Thanks to everyone that pointed this out to me. I’ll get right on it…!

EDIT - Location change! In order to better facilitate the presentations this month and to evaluate the spot for Erik’s presentation next month, we’re trying out the clubhouse at Camden, downtown, courtesy of our super awesome member, Demetrius Ford (who has excellent taste in avatars, BTW). The address is:

688 N Orange Ave
Orlando, FL 32801
(map)

Demetrius says we can park in the parking lot in front of the complex (probably also in the adjacent lot for the China Glass building, says me). The clubhouse is inside the main complex. We’ll try to leave someone outside to lead ppl in.

Small adjustment. After talking with Erik, August would work better for him. So expect to hear about Ushahidi at our Aug 8th meeting. He’ll give us an overview look at what it is, what it does, and how it’s being used. We’ll also talk about how we can get involved in helping on this project.

In the meantime, I’ll give a brief presentation on Planning Poker, and Kristian Stoyonov will be presenting a project of his own. Afterward, we’ll break out Kristian’s project into User Stories, break out the Planning Poker cards and do some estimating.

So there’s that. I’d like to keep up the “Ask-an-Expert” panel, so for that we need two things. First, bring your questions…! I know you’ve got ‘em. Heck, even I have some stuff to rant about this month! Second, we need our experts to show! We’ve got a good core group of developers with a lot of experience under their belts, including Chris Chubb, Derek Gallo, Don Organ, Eric Marden, and Bensan George, none of which we’ve seen for a month or more (for shame!).

Finally, as much as I’d love to talk about Unit Testing again with PHPUnit (we haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet), I’d really like someone else to give a presentation. Doesn’t really matter the subject matter, as long as it’s reasonably related to PHP and/or web development. If you don’t start volunteering soon, I’ll start recruiting (see above)…! O_O Maybe Chris (or someone else who was paying attention) could give a recap from the first few chapters of the PHP5 Cert Traning, or someone could dissect a recent PHP project for us…? Just some thoughts.

Looking forward to a great turn-out this month,

David @ OrlandoPHP.org

Well, the turnout wasn’t terrific, but some of our regulars were torn away to the CoLab party. Thanks to all the folks that showed up and thanks again for listening to my spiel about Unit Testing. I hope it wasn’t the MOST boring exercise of your lives…

Hey, everybody! We look different!

Yeah, that logo is a little “bleagh”, but check out our new, totally original Wordpress theme! I’m sure there will be no copyright infringement suits or cease-and-desist orders headed our way anytime soon.

We’ve also added a CAPTCHA form to the registration process and for unauthenticated users to post comments, since we’ve been getting a log of user registration spam… Which then translates to comment spam. We hate that.

Hmm, what else… Oh, yeah. BBPress is coming, so we can have a forum, too…! Neat!

Any other suggestions?

I’m not exactly sure why the February meetup copy keeps making the announcement list, but all the more reason for me to get in here and write something, right?

Well, last month’s meeting was a little thin, compared to previous, but I’m glad you all showed up! We had a great time discussing strings and arrays with Chris Chubb and trading trade secrets with one another. I personally had an interesting discussion with David H and Tony about tree and mesh traversals, and it was great to have Don Organ, former organizer of the Long Is PHP User Group and new Florida native.

Based on his input and that of others in the group, I think it would be best to move our Zend Cert training to a dedicated meeting of its own and spend our regular meeting times discussing group business and socializing, with one regular presentation and one “lightning talk” presentation. That means we need volunteers… And suggestions!

I’m certainly happy to present on any topic the group would like to hear about, and I’m sure that many of our previous presenters would do the same. I think it will be helpful to everyone, as well, if we had an open Q&A session up front - an “Ask an Expert” panel, so to speak - so we’ll start that this month, too. If you’ve got more than a basic understanding of PHP and are interesting in participating in the panel, drop me a line. I have no designs to be the “PHP guy”… so HELP!

Learn more here:
http://meetup.orlandophp.org/calendar/10102316/

Building on the success of January’s meeting, February should be interesting as well. There’s a brief recap on FloridaCreatives.com, in case you missed it. My cover of Chris Chubb’s “PHP5 Cert - Chapter 1″ presentation was a little long-winded, but we had a lot of great discussions, and many people volunteered for presentations and ideas for presentations. We ran into the ole “lots o’ people” problem again, which is never a bad thing, so the quest for a home continues (now as a poll!).

Places we’re still considering:

• Cloudspace Offices - 10244 E Colonial Dr, Suite #106, #107
• Stardust Coffee & Film - Corrine Dr & Winter Park Dr, Winter Park
• CoLab Orlando - Orange Ave & Wall St, Downtown
• Devry Institute - Millennia Blvd off Conroy Rd, S Orlando

This month’s presentations:

• “PHP5 Cert - Chapter 1″ by Chris Chubb (instead of David Rogers)
• “Anatomy of a Wordpress Plugin” by Eric Marden

Additional topics that have been suggested:

• “PHP Framework Benchmarks” by ???? (research available)
• “Javascript, Ajax, and PHP” by Phil Palmieri and Eric Marden
• “Hello Frameworks! - A Hackalong” by David Rogers and Nathan Ledet
• “Introduction to Unit Testing with PHPUnit and XDebug” by David Rogers
• “OrlandoPHP.org Goes Drupal: A Hackfest!” by Everyone!

We also discussed having monthly project presentations in an abbreviated format, like Pecha Kucha, perhaps (google it, I’m lazy), so that we could show off what we’re working on regularly. If you have more ideas, please mail the group! Others that I’d love to see include:

• “OpenID and the Problem of Distributed Identity” by Rabbit
• “Memcache is Your Friend” by Cory Collier
• “Developing in Zend Framework is Hard” by Anyone
• “Building the Blog: A Hackalong!” by David Rogers

Please take a moment to view the polls (and vote) regarding your PHP skill-level, interest in the Zend PHP5 Cert training, and topics for upcoming and previous talks. Be sure to pop into the Message Board and check out the conversation about those topics and more; we’d love to get your thoughts on both!

Hey, everybody! It’s almost that time again… No, not payday. :/ The Orlando PHP User Group meeting is only a week away! This month we’re going to host a hack-along seminar and some pertinent discussions:

What’s with the PHP already?

One of our members fielded a question to the group about why a relatively normal, even-tempered, mostly sane individual would ever dabble into the crazy, confusing, mixed-up world of PHP development in the first place. There are a million or more other languages available for development on the web: Python, Ruby, Java, JSP, ASP, .Net, Action Script (really?), javaScript (some ppl do it, y’know)… Why PHP? Derek and I will share our reasons, briefly, and open the discussion up for the floor, as well.

What I love / hate about…

We’re starting a new rant… I mean, series this month; your opportunity (and ours) to vent, uh… discuss the, er… rewards and challenges, let’s call them, of our most and least favorite aspects of the web. Right on the heels of our “Why PHP?” discussion, we’ll aim our sights… Figuratively, of course… at our favorite programming language: PHP. All versions are fair game (wooboy). From there, we’ll choose a target… subject, I should say, for next month. My vote is “Project Management Software”…!

So where do we go from here?

As some of you are aware, Devry is kicking us out. It’s not just us, of course, all the User Groups are getting “das boot”, thanks to some renovations on campus. That means we need another location, if our little menagerie of nerdery is to survive… And survive it will! Flourish even!

Well, go on. Start flourishing!

There are some proposals on the table, already, and we really want to get the pulse of the membership. If location has been your sticking point before, now’s your chance to blow up that Google group! We’ll be posting all the suggested options on OrlandoPHP.org and in the group and taking suggestions from the discussion group to the meeting, so talk it up!

New Hack-along Series Starting!

Okay, so I intentionally saved this for last. I know. I torture ppl. It’s cruel. You should see what I do to kittens. So, I’m starting a new series… Well, really re-starting an older series. Yeah, I’m gonna start that blog up again… Using Subversion… Using Zend Framework… Using PHPUnit… All of that. Primarily, I’m going to build stuff, explain why I’m building it a particular way, and show it all on a GIANT PROJECTOR! woot. You can come, ask questions, and hack along with with me (hence “hack-along”, derr). And watch me screw up and type badly. Always entertaining. :/

That’s ALL happening at the next Orlando PHP User Group meeting, June 24th, 2008, from 7pm to 9pm at Devry Institute on Millennia Blvd. You should be there!

David @ OrlandoPHP.org

The next OrlandoPHP meeting is set for May 27th from 7 - 9 p.m. at Devry room 105. I apologize for the shorter notice. We had some communication issues getting the room reserved at Devry. Non-the-less, we are set now for what will hopefully be another good meetup! We have two presenters lined up.

Ryan Price will be giving a talk on how Drupal was used for http://Petentials.com and http://OrlandoFringe.com. I have heard from some people that they are interested in Drupal. Ryan has developed plenty of sites in Drupal himself and will be able to show some real world examples of how it was implemented and problems encountered.

Cory Collier will give a run down of quick PHP performance tips and pitfalls. Join in to pick up quick and dirty performance tweaks that shouldn’t require much reworking of your code structure. He will also cover common performance pitfalls such as running the count function inside a for loop or not passing objects by reference.

As usual, we will have pizza and soda, the staple programmers diet :). Hope to see everyone there!

So I’m faced with a less-than-unique dilemma. It seems that ppl occasionally listen to what I have to say and may actually find my advice useful. Whodathunkit? Therefore, I need a method of disseminating my apocryphal wisdom to the masses and finding myself straight out of handy newspaper publications from which to spout my nerd rhetoric, I’m turning to that age-old agent of self-publication: the blog.

Okay, “age-old” is a gross exaggeration for sake of prose, but you get the picture. This has been done about a million times, in a million languages, with a million different tools. There’s even one in AppleScript, ladies and gents. Yeah, AppleScript. Google will tell you; you can trust him.

Not being a terrible fan of AppleScript, I’ve opted to use my favorite scripting / templating / programming language of choice: PHP…! And not just any PHP, but PHP5, the best PHP of all (yet)…! Furthermore, I’m kinda on this whole framework-based and test-driven development kick, so I’ll be using a couple of my other favorite tools: phpUnit 3.2 and Zend Framework 1.5. And since I’m horrible about making terrible, irrevocable filesystem mistakes directly onto the internet, there will be heavy Subversion lifting with a local Apache install to test the stupid thing in.

Now, don’t mistake my intentions, here. I well realize that I’m not about to write the latest Wordpress in a single evening, nor that I’m even capable of writing Wordpress in the first place. This is easily an indefinite project of infinite scope, and I’d love all your input on it. “You” in this case being the figurative whole of our current membership / readership. Yeah, that’s you. More minds the better, as always. Let’s hack something up real nice…!

David (at) OrlandoPHP.org

Hey, thanks to everyone who came out last week to our first meeting! It was a blast, and we all learned something about those pesky frameworks, I think. Now we need some ideas for next month… Maybe a CMS roundup? Things we love and hate about PHP? What’s the best PHP IDE and why? I love the idea for the project showcase! So much so, in fact, that I’m kinda starting my own PHP coding series at Stardust tomorrow night. I’m devoting a whole post to that, so I won’t give away too much.

Thanks for dropping back by, join ye ole fashioned Google groups, and poke around a bit!

David (at) OrlandoPHP.org