Atlanta PHP User Group

November 2009 Meeting

2009-10-22T03:10:51Z

When: Thursday, November 5, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

Presentation: The Hidden Gems in HTTP (Ben Ramsey)

200, 404, 302. Is it a lock combination? A phone number? No, they’re HTTP status codes! As we develop Web applications, we encounter these status codes and others, and often we make decisions about which ones to return without giving much thought to their meaning or context. It’s time to take a deeper look at HTTP. Knowing the methods, headers, and status codes, what they mean, and how to use them can help you develop richer Internet applications. Join Ben Ramsey as he takes you on a journey through RFC 2616 to discover some of the gems of HTTP.

This is an expanded version of a talk Ben gave at CodeWorks 2009, so be sure to come early. We’ll be starting promptly at 7:00 PM so we don’t run out of time.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

October 2009 Meeting

2009-09-04T04:52:40Z

Please note: our October meeting WILL NOT occur on the regularly scheduled date of Thursday, October 1. Instead, we will be holding it on Monday, September 28 to coincide with CodeWorks Atlanta. We hope you’ll join us for this special event.

Microsoft and Atlanta PHP invite you to join us for a special Meet the CodeWorks Speakers Happy Hour on Monday, September 28th at 6:00pm. Please come mix and mingle with the speakers and thought leaders of the PHP community!

Here’s a list of some of the speakers who will be attending:

Andrei Zmievski
Ben Ramsey
Brian Moon
Cal Evans
Chris Shiflett
Derick Rethans
Ed Finkler
Elizabeth Naramore
Glen Gordon
Matthew Turland
Matthew Weier O’Phinney
Scott MacVicar
Sean Coates

and more…

The Happy Hour will take place at 6:00pm on Monday, September 28th at Gordon Biersch in midtown Atlanta. Gordon Biersch is easily accessible from Marta’s Midtown Station. So, if you’re staying at the Sheraton Gateway conference hotel, take the hotel shuttle to the airport and ride the train to Midtown Station. Gordon Biersch will be about a five block walk. See the link to directions below.

Many thanks to local Microsoft Developer Evangelist Glen Gordon for helping to make this event possible. Microsoft will be covering appetizers and entrées. Attendees are responsible for their own drinks.

Please RSVP at http://meetup.atlantaphp.org/calendar/11165442/ so we can get an accurate head-count for planning purposes.

We hope to see you there!

If you’ve not yet registered for the CodeWorks conference, register today at http://codeworks.mtacon.com/schedule/city/atlanta

Location on Bing Maps: http://tr.im/gordonbierschatl
Directions from Marta’s Midtown Station: http://tr.im/xP1y

September 2009 Meeting

2009-10-22T03:00:37Z

When: Thursday, September 3, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

NOTE: New location within Colony Square. Details at the link above.

Presentation: Command Line PHP (Jeff Jones)

In this session, Jeff Jones will teach us about PHP’s Command Line Interface (CLI), how to write interactive PHP command line scripts, and how to interface with other CLI scripts from within PHP. Time permitting, he may also cover CLI in the context of PHP frameworks.

Location

Our meeting will take place in the Plaza Level Conference Room at Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta. Click here for directions.

August 2009 Meeting

2009-08-01T04:41:56Z

When: Thursday, August 6, 2009—7pm-9pm
Where: Columbus Room at Colony Square, Midtown Atlanta

NOTE: New location within Colony Square. Details at the link above.

Presentation: Patterns and Tools for Database Versioning, Migration, Data Loading and Test Data (Alan Pinstein)

Do you find yourself sweating a little every time you upgrade your production database? Is setting up a new server or developer workstation a time-consuming and painful process? Are you skipping tests because it’s just too much of a pain to get good test data into the database?

In this session, Alan will cover a variety of tools and techniques to manage and organize your projects to save time, reduce errors, and improve your productivity:

– Managing database versioning with MP (Migrations for PHP)
– Loading baseline data and test data with fixtures using Propel and Phocoa
– Integrate database management into your project management workflows using rake

After attending this session you should be able to make immediate changes to your project to improve productivity and increase code quality and reliability.

Location

Our meeting takes place in the Columbus Room at 100 Colony Square in Midtown Atlanta (at the corner of Peachtree and 14th Streets). Click here for directions.

Atlanta PHP Welcomes CodeWorks on Sep 28th & 29th

2009-06-29T22:35:14Z

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!

No July Meeting

2009-06-29T21:22:28Z

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.

Atlanta PHP TestFest 2009 Event

2009-05-07T21:38:01Z

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.

June 2009 Meeting

2009-04-27T18:59:12Z

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.

May 2009 Meeting

2009-05-04T18:53:44Z

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

Consolidating Atlanta PHP Communication Channels

2009-04-05T18:46:05Z

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)