Zend Framework Introduction

See Zend Framework Introduction at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Slides from last night's Zend Framework Introduction at the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group are now available online:

Zend Framework Introduction

View more presentations from Bradley Holt.

The presentation is available under a Creative Commons license.

As I mentioned earlier, there's also a demo blogging application called Postr available on GitHub. The application is available under a free/open source New BSD License so feel free to use, redistribute, and/or modify it however you'd like.

Learn Zend Framework

See Learn Zend Framework at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

At tonight's (Thursday, January 28, 2010) Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group meeting I'll be giving a Zend Framework Introduction presentation. I'll be covering how to use several features of Zend Framework and common patterns including:

• Zend_Tool
• Zend_Application
• Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Zend_Layout
• Action Controllers
• View Scripts
• Zend_Test
• Modeling domain objects
  
• Zend_Form
• Zend_Db_Table
• Data Mapper
• Zend_Paginator
• Zend_Date
• Zend_Markup
• Zend_Navigation
• Controller Plugins

I've created a demo blogging application called Postr that I'll be using as an example throughout the presentation. Thanks to Jason there is some CSS that makes the application much more usable. I will post the presentation to my SlideShare account after tonight's meeting.

The meeting is from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM at Office Squared in Burlington, Vermont. If you're in the area and interested in attending then you can register for free on Eventbrite.

Year In Review

See Year In Review at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Being the first day of 2010, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at 2009…

Burlington, VT PHP Users Group

2009 was the second full year of the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. We had some fun meetings and presentations including:

January

Jason Pelletier gave a presentation on CSS for Developers.

CSS for Developers

View more documents from jason.pelletier.

February

Aaron Carlino demonstrated SilverStripe, an open source CMS/framework built in PHP.

March

Special guest Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation called "Easy Problems are the Hard Problems" taking an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of building web applications.

April

Rob Riggen gave a talk on website performance optimization.

May

Rene Churchill gave a presentation on MySQL database optimization.

July

Matthew Weier O'Phinney gave his Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects presentation.

Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects

View more presentations from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.

August

Matthew Weier O'Phinney presented again in August, this time giving a hands-on unit testing crash course [ODP].

September

September's meeting was a casual get-together instead of a formal meeting and presentation—a change of pace from the typical meeting format.

October

I gave a talk geared towards PHP beginners.

November

November's meeting fell on one of Zend Framework's Bug Hunt Days. Held monthly, Bug Hunt Days are designed to encourage the community to help triage and resolve issues in the framework. Matthew Weier O'Phinney guided us through effective bug reporting and taught us how to contribute patches. As part of Bug Hunt Days, my first Zend Framework patch was accepted, a small addition to the documentation.

December

December marked the second birthday of our local PHP Users Group and that month's meeting turned out to be a fun social event.

Our users group also won a free pass to ZendCon '09, and Jase Roberts was the lucky recipient. He joined fellow Vermonters Matthew Weier O'Phinney, John Valance, and me at the annual PHP conference.

The Browser

Jonathan Butler started a program on our local community radio station called The Browser. It's "a show about the people who bring the world wide web to [Burlington, VT]." Jason and I were on the show twice—once in February and again in August.

Town Meeting Day Vermont, ACM-NE, and Tagnabit

The first Tuesday of March was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont gathered together to elect local officers and vote on budgets. As an experiment we put together a website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites around Town Meeting Day Vermont '09. If you used the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog posts (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content showed up on the website. I wrote a post recapping some things we learned from the experiment.

As a result of that project, Bill Simmon and Seth Mobley from Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) approached us about doing something similar for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) conference they were organizing here in Burlington, VT. We built acmne.net/09 for the conference and it was a big hit. I spoke on a social media panel (which Liz Schlegel moderated) and helped with a social media workshop at the conference. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, posted a good summary of the conference on his blog.

We then took the idea from Town Meeting Day Vermont and ACM-NE a step further, creating Tagnabit—aggregating tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon wrote a good blog post on how Tagnabit could be used.

Jelly/Coworking

I was excited to see Jen Mincar open up a coworking space, Office Squared (o²), here in Burlington, VT in 2009. I think it will help bring more cohesiveness to the local technology community since many of her customers work in technology-related industries. As a precursor to its opening, we hosted a Jelly at Found Line in July, inviting entrepreneurs and freelancers to work in our studio for an afternoon. Here are some photos from the Jelly and another one at the Burlington Free Press.

Vermont Code Camp

September saw the first ever Vermont Code Camp, bringing together people from local technology communities around .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The event was a huge success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions. I had a small part in organizing the event but the real credit goes to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman, and everyone else who organized, volunteered, and presented. I also gave a presentation on Resource-Oriented Web Services as part of the code camp.

Resource-Oriented Web Services

View more documents from Bradley Holt.

ZendCon

ZendCon is the biggest conference of the PHP community, and this year's event was my second ZendCon. What can I say? The talks were excellent. The people were even better. I ended up co-presenting at the UnCon with Michelangelo van Dam and Anna Filina on the role of a PHP user group.

Moving On

2009 seemed to be the year for people in the PHP community to change jobs. Following that trend, I made the move to Found Line full time last month, leaving Vermont Oxford Network. As I said before I'm very happy to have more time to focus on our clients' projects and to work with free/open source software and open standards full time.

Work

2009 was a busy year. Some of the work included:

• helping ThinkFlood launch their RedEye product by building their website and eCommerce application (see the Rackspace Cloud blog post on the launch);
• building a news article management tool for NEHP's website;
• creating Vermont Public Radio's Artist Mug Gallery, Champlain 400, School Closings, Search, and States of Marriage pages;
• launching Common Good Vermont; and
  
• developing and maintaining a line of business web application for the University of Vermont.

Phew—a lot to say! I hope you had a good 2009, and have an even better 2010.

Bug Hunting

See Bug Hunting at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

If you are a PHP developer in the Burlington, Vermont area then you should come to tomorrow (11/19) evening's PHP Users Group meeting at the newly opened Office Squared coworking space in downtown Burlington. This month we will be learning how to find and fix bugs in free and open source projects. From the meeting description:

Each third Thursday and Friday of the month, Zend Framework has Bug Hunt Days in which the community helps triage issues and resolve them. These efforts include everything from fixing typos in documentation to creating reproduce cases and capturing them in unit tests to actual creation of patches resolving reported bugs.

Since this month's meeting falls on the third Thursday, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Project Lead for Zend Framework, thought we could join in on this effort or help contribute to other projects. He will be providing a short presentation on effective bug reporting and triage, after which we will jump into some actual bug hunting on projects you, the attendees, are interested in.

So come with your laptops ready, and let's fix some bugs!

PHP developers of all skill levels are welcome. There are many types of contributions needed to keep free and open source projects moving forward. You will likely have something you can contribute — and you'll learn a lot doing it!

Beginner PHP Code Examples

See Beginner PHP Code Examples at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

At last month's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting I presented a session on beginner PHP. The code examples can be downloaded (or forked) from GitHub. The talk was geared towards complete beginners and covered the basic structure of a PHP script, variables, comments, data types, arrays (enumerative, associative and multi-dimensional), operators, conditionals, iterative constructs, functions, scope, web forms and database access. I've licensed the code examples under the New BSD license in case anyone wants to use and/or modify them for their own beginner PHP talk.

Beginner PHP

See Beginner PHP at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users group has been going strong for almost two years now. We've had lots of great presentations and some really experienced PHP developers at the meetings. However, I've been concerned that we might scare away PHP beginners with many of the meetings being on advanced topics. So, our next meeting topic will be Beginner PHP:

Have you recently started using PHP? Don't use PHP but want to learn more about it? The topic of this month's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting will be, "Beginner PHP." Learn the basics and some tips and tricks from experienced PHP developers. Are you an experienced PHP developer? Then come to the meeting and help out some beginners! We were all beginners at some point.

Refreshments will be provided, and you'll have the chance to network and connect with fellow PHP developers. Meetings are open to the public via RSVP.

PHP Users Group Social

See PHP Users Group Social at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Tonight (9/24) the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group will be hosting its first "social" event. We'll be having a casual get-together at Madera's in place of the typical meeting format. We've also extended an open invitation for non-PHP people to come and join us. The Vermont Code Camp earlier this month was a great opportunity for local technology and user groups to mingle and I think there is a lot we can learn from each other. So, PHP developer or not, I hope to see you this evening! You can RSVP up until 5pm tonight.

Vermont Technology User Groups

See Vermont Technology User Groups at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

One of the great things to come out of this past Saturday's Vermont Code Camp was the opportunity for people from various local technology user groups to connect with one another. People from the Vermont.NET User Group were there (the .NET group spearheaded organizing the event) and I also saw some friends from the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. Based on turnout at the Ruby on Rails session, it looks like the Vermont Ruby On Rails User Group may be restarting soon. The Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) was represented as well as the Green Mountain Oracle Users Group, the New England Adobe User Group, the VT SQL Server Users Group and the Vermont Software Developers' Alliance (vtSDA).

User groups are a great way to meet new people, learn new skills and keep up with the latest trends in your field. Sometimes you'll even be treated to pizza and swag. Whatever technology you work with, I hope you'll find a local user group that you can attend — or start one yourself!

On a related note, the upcoming (10/26) Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam looks like it will be a lot of fun:

[Showcasing] the coolest companies in the Green Mountains[, this is] not just a job expo. The event will examine the uniqueness of the state’s entrepreneur-founded creative technology companies while acknowledging the start-up drive that lives within each and every one of us.

Update (9/15): To clarify, the Vermont Software Developers' Alliance (vtSDA) is not a user group but instead, "create[s] collaborative and knowledge sharing opportunities that promote and grow Vermont software businesses." They are also a primary sponsor of the aforementioned Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam.

Vermont Code Camp Heroes

See Vermont Code Camp Heroes at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

By all accounts, the first ever Vermont Code Camp was a big success! There were 85 attendees, 19 sessions, and a whole track of non-.NET topics (not that there's anything wrong with .NET!). A HUGE thank you to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman and everyone else who organized, volunteered and presented. Also, a big thank you to the sponsors and donors: MyWebGrocer, Green Mountain Coffee, Telerik, O'Reilly Media, TechSmith, Microsoft and, of course, the University of Vermont School of Business Administration for hosting the event.

Plans are afoot for the next iteration of Vermont Code Camp so stay tuned!

Vermont Code Camp

See Vermont Code Camp at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

This Saturday (Sept 12) from 9am-6pm will be the first ever Vermont Code Camp and it will be here in Burlington, Vermont at Kalkin Hall on the University of Vermont campus. While code camps are typically .NET focused, this one will cover a broad range of topics including .NET, PHP, Ruby and Python (full list of sessions). Some of the sessions include:

• Alison Gianotto: Facebook Application Development with PHP
• Bryan Tuttle: Introduction to Joomla!
• Bradley Holt (me): Resource-Oriented Web Services
• Sergei Serdyuk: Why Ruby On Rails?
• Josh Sled: The Django web-application framework
• Dave Burke: Building Online Communities with .NET Open Source

Hope to see you there!

Free ZendCon Pass

See Free ZendCon Pass at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users Group has won a free pass to ZendCon '09 along with Austin PHP Meetup, the Chicago PHP User Group, PHPBenelux, and PHPWomen. Congratulations to my fellow PHP users group members! Now we need to pick a lucky member to get the free ZendCon pass. Are you a local PHP developer that meets the criteria? If so then send in your application by 8/1/2009.

New Media Office Hours (East)

See New Media Office Hours (East) at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

If you're a "new media" (social media, digital video/photography/editing, podcasting, etc.) enthusiast (or just curious) in Burlington, Vermont then you should check out the New Media Office Hours this evening. From the VCAM blog:

So we’d like to officially announce that the first New Media Office Hours (east-coast) gathering will be this coming Monday evening at The Sapa coffeehouse in downtown Burlington at 5:00 P.M. A small group of new-media pros and arm-chair enthusiasts will be on hand to chat with anyone who stops by about whatever is on their mind (related to new-media, that is).

I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make but it sounds like a fun event!

Jelly!

See Jelly! at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Are you an entrepreneur, freelancer, or just someone looking to work out of the office for an afternoon? Then sign up for the upcoming Jelly that we'll be hosting at our Burlington, Vermont studio! The date is Friday, July 31^st from 1pm to 5pm. A Jelly is a casual coworking event. For more info on local coworking plans check out the BHive LinkedIn group.

We'll provide the Wi-Fi and coffee (please bring a travel mug so we don't run out of mugs), you bring your laptop (or whatever you need to work). Our studio is small so space is limited. Depending on the number of attendees it could get crowded, so please bring a friendly disposition. Be sure to sign up (it's free!) early to reserve your spot. If there's no remaining space by the time you read this, please contact me (you can simply leave a comment here if you prefer) or Jen Mincar and let us know that you're interested so that we can let you know if space opens up.

Tagnabit Usage

See Tagnabit Usage at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

It's been two weeks since we launched tagnabit. I want to share some information about how people have been using tagnabit. Some of the most popular tags used so far include:

btv

BTV is the airport code for Burlington, Vermont (where we are located). This tag is pretty heavily used on Twitter to represent our city, but it seems to have other meanings on the other social media sites.

btvsmb

A local event, the Burlington Social Media Breakfast took place a few weeks ago.

acmedia09

Next month in Portland, Oregon is the Alliance for Community Media's International Conference and Exhibition. The activity so far has all been on Twitter. If it's anything like acmne09 then I won't be surprised to see lots of photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks once the conference gets started.

tek09

php|tek 2009 was a PHP Conference that took place last month in Chicago, Illinois. While tagnabit actually launched after the conference was finished, it was an example tag that I used to explain the idea behind tagnabit to several people in the PHP community. There's lots of great content tagged with tek09. Tagnabit is built using PHP and Zend Framework in case you're wondering what the connection is.

cxage

Leadership in a Connected Age conference - also a local event.

champ400

The tag for the Celebrate Champlain Quadricentennial events taking place here this summer (sensing a local trend?). There will be lots of happenings so hopefully there is a good amount of participation in tagging content around the events. Vermont Public Radio is encourage people to tag content about Champlain 400 as well, so that should help.

On a more serious note, another tag worth mentioning (although I don't think anyone's used tagnabit for this yet) is the iranelection tag. There is a constant stream of tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks using this tag. Our thoughts are with the Iranian people.

Tell us how you've been using tagnabit. Do you plan on using it for an upcoming event? Are you mainly using it to follow tags or are you also posting content? We've got lots of ideas for improving tagnabit but would love to hear your thoughts! You can either comment here or use the tagnabit tag to give us feedback through Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious.

ACM-NE Conference

See ACM-NE Conference at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last week the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) had a conference here in Burlington, Vermont. Organizers of the conference encouraged participants to use a shared tag, acmne09, on sites such as Twitter, Flickr, blogs, YouTube, and Delicious. We created a website for the conference (similar to what we had done for Town Meeting Day) that aggregated content from these various social media websites. You can see the website at acmne.net/09.

I also had the pleasure of speaking on a social media panel and helping with a social media workshop. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, has a good summary of the conference on his blog.

Open (local) Government

See Open (local) Government at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last night I went to the Burlington, Vermont City Council meeting to listen to our newly re-elected mayor, Bob Kiss, give his State of the City speech and watch the City Council attempt to elect a new council president. I said "attempt" because, after 14 rounds of voting, they were still deadlocked 7-7 for opposing candidates. However, that's not what I want to talk about. In Mayor Bob Kiss' speech he made the following statement:

My administration worked closely with the Open Government Committee formed by resolution of the City Council. In response to committee recommendations, we’ve included more information about public meetings on the City web-site and the Planning Department added a new section about proposed and pending zoning amendments. During the campaign it was clear that people want to know more about the activities of each city department. Over the next year we’ll look closely at how to finance and build a more uniform, responsive and user-friendly City website that will keep you better informed about public meetings and how you can participate in the process of government.

I'm all for open government and the City of Burlington, Vermont could certainly use a better website. I'd like to give the city some advice on its priorities in building a better website. This blog post is my first round of advice, but I'd like to hear reactions from other web people in and around Burlington — or anyone else who has an interest in our city having a better website! This advice is based on the goals outlined by Mayor Bob Kiss: that the website is inline with the spirit of Open Government, is responsive, and is user-friendly.

First, the website must be accessible and use open standards. I put these two together because by using open standards the website can be accessible. Specifically, the website should use strictly semantic XHTML. This allows for its use in the widest range of user agents (browsers) by the widest range of user abilities (as opposed to disabilities). Its presentation should be progressively enriched through CSS and its behavior should be progressively enhanced through unobtrusive JavaScript. Progressive enhancement means that the website is useful, at its core, without any CSS or JavaScript. It becomes more useful through the use of CSS and then, perhaps, even more useful through the use of JavaScript. However, neither CSS nor JavaScript should be required to access the website's content.

Second, the website should be built using free (as in freedom, not cost) and open source software. It is our government's responsibility to use non-proprietary software wherever possible. When it comes to building websites and web applications, there are no excuses for not using free and open source software. The capabilities of the open web platforms available equal, or exceed, the capabilities of proprietary web platforms. Any custom software developed for the city's website must be licensed to the city under a free and open source license (this does not mean that the city shouldn't pay for this software to be developed).

Third, the city should embrace the concept of open linked data. This means that the city should publish data, not just content. This data should be both human and machine readable. This allows third parties to access raw data and repurpose this data in new and interesting ways. To this end, data and content should be either put in the public domain (which is probably the case already) or use a Creative Commons license. Where possible, the city's website should consume open data published by others rather than duplicating effort. There are several technical approaches to publishing and consuming open linked data including Microformats and the Semantic Web.

I hope these recommendations are useful. Once I've heard some feedback from other web people, I'll forward these recommendations to my city councilors and the mayor. Hopefully they'll find it helpful in improving the city's website!

PHP Users Group Meeting Tonight

See PHP Users Group Meeting Tonight at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The presenter at tonight's (3/26/2009) Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting will be Paul Reinheimer of php|architect. His presentation, "Easy Problems are the Hard Problems," will take an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of web applications. There will be pizza for your consumption (provided by Found Line). If you're a web developer in the area then I hope to see you there! If you know any web developers who may be interested, please let them know about tonight's meeting.