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!

The PHP Unconference 2007 was one of the most amazing events of the past year, head to head with FrOSCon. Therfore I'm pretty much looking forward to the second installment of the conference, which will take place on April 26th and 27th this year. I'm sure that again a large crowd of really nice geeks will attend and I'm especially looking forward to see many good friends there again. While we already traveled there with a good delegation of Dortmund usergroopies last year, it looks like we will be even more this year. Stay tuned for the Ruhrpott invasion, Hamburg! ;)

If you did not register, yet, take your heels and sign up. There are only 120 attendee slots and it will be absolutly worth it! :) Looking forward to see you in Hamburg in April! I hope the weather is as nice as it was last year.

When my friend Marcus asked me if I'd like to order ElePHPants with him together to save shipping cost I thought it would be time that our local PHP usergroup gets some new members: The ElePHPant family! After I messed up with our original order in May 2007 (because of too much work with the book and more), I thought it would be nice to give an ElePHPant to the core members as a belated christmas present. See the happy people and their ElePHPant family below:

As a side note in this post I'd like to wish all of you out there a good start into 2008! 2007 was a very turbulent year for me, from successes - like Kore's and my first book and our (at least I think) cool Webdav component - to some private drawbacks, which is why I did not blog much in the past weeks/months. But stay tuned, I will be more active in the future again! :) So long: Enjoy the (mostly) silent first days of the year, before the stress comes up again! :)

P.S.: RIP PHP 4! Finally! ;)

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!

During this years eZ Conference, which was an amazing event, I saw the first draft of the original PHP elephant plush toy! Amazingly cool!

For more information, see Damien Seguys official elephant website.

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.

While I have not been to any conference since last november, the time of the conferences seems to come again. So, here I go:

• May 5th and 6th: PHP Unconference Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. I'll be there to meet up with the German community and a lot of friends from Hamburg and all over Germany and to possible give some talks, if there is interesst. A large portion of the PHP Usergroup Dortmund will attend, too.
• May 21st to 23rd: International PHP Conference Spring Edition, Ludwigsburg, Germany. Kore and me will be giving 2 talks here and the usually meetup with the international PHP community will take place. I'm quite currious on how this new location will be. Our talks are:
  • The eZ Components roundup, an overview on the status of eZ Components (in German language).
  • PHPotter - Doing magic with PHP, some kind of suprise talk about lots of magic you can do in the PHP language (in English language).
• June 7th and 8th: eZ Conference & eZ Awards, Skien, Norway. This annual Open Source event at the eZ headquaters is one of my favorite events. Beside different talks about open source and CMS topics, there will be an exhibition and the eZ Awards show, which is a great evening event. I'll be giving a talk there, too:
  • eZ Components, a deeper look at the status of eZ Components (in English language).
• June 9th: PHP Vikinger, Skien, Norway. After the success of last year, the PHP Vikinger will again take place directly after the eZ Conference in Skien. This Unconference is especially nice, because of its nice environment (Norway is beautifull!). I'm sure a lot of the usual suspects will attend and we will have a great time!

So, if you are interessted, have any questions or just want to have a beer or 2 with the community, don't hesitate to join us on one of the conferences! :)

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!}

Hence our usual location, the HiccUp, has a large reservation, this weeks PHP Usergroup Dortmund meeting will take place at the "Boomerang" in Dortmund down town. This meeting will (because of the lack of wifi and power there) without notebooks. Sure you may bring yours, if you have a special problemor want to show something interesting, but it will not be the usual hacking session. For beer lovers, I recommend leaving the car at home, because Boomerang is an Australian bar and they have quite delicious beer (Fosters). ;) Beside that, they have also really delicious food.