Location change: we’re meeting at 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, or you can call me to let you in: 843-345-3522

This month, we’ll hear from Erik Hersman about his Open Source project, Ushahidi, which attempts to crowd-source crisis information. It’s written in PHP with Kohana, essentially a PHP5 version of CodeIgniter.

Erik and I originally chatted at FOWA Miami 2009 about OrlandoPHP contributing to the project as a group and giving us a presentation. Between looking for neat stuff in Africa, speaking at TED, and winning grants and stuff, he’s hard to pin down. So we’re really fortunate that he’s a local…!

In addiition, we’ll be continuing our exercise from July: breaking down Kristian Stoyanov’s TASCK project and estimating it with Story Points, per my presentation. This was a lot of fun for everyone, it seemed, and we didn’t quite make it through the whole project. More details and a recap will be posted on OrlandoPHP.org shortly.

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! It was great to see Derek Gallo again this month, and we had some new faces, as well. Chris Chubb, , Don Organ, Eric Marden, and Bensan George were still MIA, unfortunately.

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

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

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!

I have posted the first meeting up on Upcoming.org. We will most likely start posting every event there as well as on the Central Florida Tech Calendar on Google (I need to get write access from Gregg w/ orug.org first though).

Upcoming.org link: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/469406/?ps=5

The inaugural meeting of OrlandoPHP.org is scheduled for April 22nd, 2008, at Devry Campus on Millennia Blvd (it’s actually across from Target, across from Millennia Mall), in room 106. Our proposed topic for the month will be “Framework-Based Development in PHP”, highlighting the differences between the various, popular PHP frameworks. Among those slated for discussion:

• Zend Framework
• cakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony
• Roll-Your-Own!

Additional suggestions are welcomed, below, and “experts” in those frameworks suggested are encouraged to participate, as we’re planning for an open-panel-style discussion rather than a slide-by-slide presentation. Please provide feedback and comments below on which frameworks you use in development and why, or why you’ve chosen a different route. Seeya there!

The OrlandoPHP.org Team