Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund will again organize PHP @ FrOSCon this year. As usual this happens in cooperation with the PHP Usergroups Köln/Bonn and Hamburg. The Free and Open Source Conference 2008 is going to happen on August 23rd and 24th. Instead of the past 2 years, we'll not only have a dedicated project room. A dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon track will be a part of the FrOSCon main conference program.

We are looking forward to your application for a session for PHP @ FrOSCon from today on. More information can be found on our dedicated PHP @ FrOSCon website. We are again happily looking forward to this event, which already was extremly nice in the past 2 years. Hope to see you there! :)

As you might remember, FrOSCon and PHP @ FrOSCon are organized completly on a voluntary basis. Therefore we are searching for sponsors who can take over trip and accommodation cost for our speakers. In turn you will receive an individual advertisement package or similar. Thanks in advance!

Finally, after a long call-for-papers and a 2 weeks decision phase, the PHP Usergroup Dortmund is proud to announce the timetable for the PHP-room at this years Free and Open Source Conference in St. Augustin, near Bonn, Germany.

In contrast to last year, the PHP-room will have a 2 day program of a dedicated PHP and web talks. Speakers include members of the usergroup, like my friend Kore Nordmann who will talk about tagging and problems with it concerning different cultural backgrounds and internationalization issues. Beside that, we have some other prominent community members on board, like my friends Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Carola Kummert, Arne Blankerts and Jan Lehnardt.

The topics presented vary between Unicode news and PHP's dirty secrets, by Derick, Sebastians usual introduction on PHPUnit, XUL in theory and praxis by Karola/Arne and a talk about deployment of PHP applications by David Coallier. Beside that, Jan will talk about next generation web storage with CouchDB, Henri Bergius is joining us for session about personal information management with Midgard, Falko Menge will inform us on web services with PHP and Guillaume Jarysta-Dautel will present a session about rich internet applications.

I'm really sad, that I will most propably not able to enjoy this great event, but you will have fun there anyway, I'm sure.

After a long term of proposal time, the call for paper for the PHP room at the FrOSCon conference is finally over. The PHP Usergroup Dortmund will evaluate the received proposals by the end of next week and will inform speakers about their proposal status ASAP. An official time table for the PHP room will be available in about 3-4 weeks.

Just to remind you, if you did not propose a talk yet for PHP@FrOSCon, be sure to hurry! The call for papers will end this Friday, so take your heels and propose something interessting!

We already received a lot of interessting talks, including topics like "PHP goes unicode", "Next generation data storage with CouchDb" and "Testen von PHP-Anwendungen mit PHPUnit". Thanks for all the volunteers who proposed a talk, yet. We will inform you soon about the status of your talk!

Because the members of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund were a bit busy in the past weeks, we totally forgot about the nearing end of our call for papers for the PHP room at FrOSCon 2007. Therefore, here comes the reminder and the announcement, that our call for papers is extended until June 29th. So if you did not send your proposal, yet, please submit it ASAP, so that we can start evaluating the proposals. All information about PHP@FrOSCon can be found on our official PHP room website.

Thanks in advance for those who already provided proposals, we already received some very interessting talks! :)

If you did not know about FrOSCon yet, you should definitly take a look at the FrOSCon website, it is an excellent open source event in the style of Linuxtag in former days.

The PHP Usergroup Dortmund is proud to announce the call for papers for this years PHP room at the "Free and OpenSource Conference". The conference, which is organized purely by open source enthusiasts on a voluntary basis, will take place from 2007-08-25 and 26. Location of the FrOSCon will again be the University of St. Augustin (near Bonn), Germany.

As last year, we are organizing a session program in the PHP room (2 days, this year!), which is independant from the FrOSCon talks program. We hope to receive a lot of session proposals for this really great event. So take your heels and propose some interesting topic! :)

For further details, please take a look at our official PHP room website (including our call for sponsors and papers).

^{If you have any questions, feedback of information, do not hesistate to comment here or contact me directly!}

FrOSCon ended yesterday, but because the net was cut down too early, I could not blog this one. So I'm doing that now.

Congratulations to the FrOSCon organization team. The organization was really good: The talks were well chosen, there were a lot of helpers on their way to support the attendants and speakers. The equipment was excellent (the main conference rooms as well as the dedicated PHP room, where we stayed the past 2 days). Also excellent was the catering provided for speakers and helpers, if you consider that this was an almost free of charge event! Great work, guys and girls, I hope you will repeat this event next year!

For the PHP room, we are pretty satisfied, too. The room equipment was (as already mentioned) great and all speakers held their talks in time. The attendance was quite fluctuating and quite different as I expected. So the talk about "Geeklog" was crowded (about 15 people, beside us 5 from the PHP UG DO and Thomas Weinert from the [ PHP UG KB]), while the most interessting talk about "A web services framework for PHP5" was not that crowded (about 5 attendants). Most of the slides from the talks are already linked on the PHP at FrOSCon website. Todays hackaton was not that interesting, though, but we only had that, because there was no time to plan another day of talks. Surely, the PHP room would be more frequented, if the FrOSCon was not in parallel to PHP Vikinger. Anyway, we will try to avoid this issue next year and will probably go to organize a 2 day sub-conference to the FrOSCon, including many talks.

So long, another week of conferences past and I'm quite happy to relax a bit. Looking forward to the next conf. So long...

I just commited the slides from my recent talk "Enterprise PHP development with eZ components". It should be online in a couple of minutes here.

Kore and me held our talk about "PHP best practices" this morning at the Free and Open Source software Conference and were quite successful, AFAICT. There were about 50 attendees, which listened concentrated over the whole time. The talk contains an overview on how to behave when coding PHP in respect to

• General guidelines
• Security
• Performance

and gives a general overview on useful tools around PHP development.

You can find the slides in the php.net talks section.

Correction, June 30th 2006: Ok, the guys from my usergroup convinced me to correct this. There were about 100 attendees in the talk, not only 50. :)

I'm just back from the eZ publish conference in Skien, Norway, (see my first roundup here) and will directly start through to the first Free and Open Source Conference in Bonn. As already announced, we (the PHP usergroup Dortmund) organized a professional PHP track tomorrow, in cooperation with the PHP usergroup K?ln/Bonn. On Sunday we will have a PHP hackaton, where every geek is invitsed to join us for hacking/chatting/whatever.

Beside that, Kore and me will give 3 talks in the main FrOSCon program:

• 3D-Rendering in PHP
• PHP best practices
• Enterprise PHP development

Hope to see you there! :)

We finally managed to get the program online for the professional PHP track at the Free and Open Source Conference 2006, which takes place on the next weekend (June 24th and 25th) in Bonn, Germany. We will have 6 PHP related talks on Saturday, held by professional PHP developers, and a hackaton event on Sunday. Everyone is invited to join us and have a good time.

The selected talks are:

• 10:00 Using Geeklog as a Web Application Framework (english)
• 11:00 Web Service Toolkit f?r PHP5 (german)
• 12:00 "Regular expressions" oder "Performing magic on texts" (german)
• 14:00 SVG and AJAX (german)
• 15:00 XMLReader/Writer (english)
• 16:00 XSLT als Templatesystem (german)

Thanks to all the speakers for providing their knowledge completly without charge to the public. We are looking forward to a great event!

As Kore already mentioned, the call for papers for the PHP room at the FrOSCon is running out. So take your heels and propose now!