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.

The PHP Community

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

Last week I was at ZendCon, the largest yearly event of the PHP community. One thing that I've been thinking about lately, and something that many other people have talked about, is how unique the PHP community is. People are generally friendly and welcoming. Rarely do you run into someone who thinks he or she is somehow better than anyone else. Sure, you'll get the occasional RTFM on a mailing list but ask anyone who's interacted with the PHP community and they'll probably have something nice to say.

I'm relatively new to the PHP community myself. Sure, I've been a PHP developer for about eight years but I hadn't really been involved in the community until I started our local PHP users group two years ago. There I met many talented local PHP developers including Matthew Weier O'Phinney, now project lead for Zend Framework. I had actually started using Zend Framework a little while before I met Matthew not realizing that one of the developers lived here in Vermont. I then went to ZendCon '08 which was my introduction to the international PHP community.

I think one of the things that makes the PHP community so strong is that we've had to build the community ourselves (my part in building the PHP community has been relatively tiny). Having had some involvement in other technology communities, I've seen the kind of support that companies like Microsoft can provide to strengthen their respective communities. During the "Meet the Zend Team" session at this year's ZendCon, Keith Casey asked what Zend was going to do to further support user groups. I was very happy to hear this question asked.

I'd like to see Zend do more to support user groups — although I don't have any room to talk with Matthew being a regular attendee and presenter at our local user group. In fact, as a response to Keith's question Matthew reiterated his offer to present at other user groups if he was in the area (which, frankly, was a much better answer than the rest of the Zend team gave). Chris Cornutt published a blog post today asking what role should companies take in the developer community ecosystem. I don't think it's any one company or organization's job to support the PHP community. Help is most certainly welcome but I think our strength is in doing it ourselves.

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 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.

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.

SilverStripe CMS Overview

See SilverStripe CMS Overview at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Aaron Carlino will giving an overview of the SilverStripe CMS / framework at this week's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting (details). The meeting will be held Thursday February 26th, 2009 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm at Bluehouse Group in Richmond. As always, the meeting is open to the public (but be sure to RSVP so we can get a headcount).

For those new to the group, the local PHP users group has been around for a bit over a year now (our first meeting was in December of 2007). A typical meeting has between 10 and 15 people in attendance and there's usually a main presentation along with some general discussion. The mailing list has about 100 subscribers with moderate traffic (several posts a month) and some of us hang out in the #btvphpug channel on freenode in case you're interested in conversation with local PHP developers between meetings.

Browser Correction

See Browser Correction at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

On last week's The Browser interview (audio) with Jason Pelletier (jason_pelletier) and me, Jonathan Butler (jonathanpb) asked me for an example of a proprietary framework and I used Adobe Flex as an example. It turns out that the Flex SDK is actually not a proprietary framework and is, in fact, open source. I should have known this since Adobe Flex was the topic of a whole PHP users group meeting awhile back. John Boone (jbgoode12) pointed this out to me in an interesting conversation he and I (BradleyHolt) had on Twitter:

jbgoode12: @jonathanpb @BradleyHolt @jason_pelletier listening to ep 2 of The Browser - also very interesting! One correction: the Flex SDK is open src (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @jason_pelletier @BradleyHolt @jonathanpb It's true that the Flex IDE costs $$$ but you can create Flash w/open src: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Good point! I guess I was thinking about Adobe Flex Builder. Didn't meant to pick on Adobe, just one example of proprietary SW. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Oh, and thanks for listening to the show, glad you're finding it interesting! (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt @jason_pelletier It's like how Micro$oft does it : they have open SDKs but the IDEs are $. FB is based on Eclipse, tho (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Yeah - technically open source but to do anything practical takes lots of work or spending money to make it easier. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 But you're right, the framework itself (Flex SDK) certainly appears to be open source. I stand corrected :-) (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt It'll be interesting to see if an ecosystem grows around the Flex SDK, like maybe the relationship between .NET and Mono... (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 That will be interesting to watch. The Flash Player is still proprietary (although there are some alts) which could be a problem. (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt right. and the flash player being proprietary kinda makes the rest moot... plus you can do a lot with frameworks like jquery. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 I love jQuery! Would be cool (but unlikely) if Adobe truly opened up everything Flash related as open source and open standards. (view tweet)

I appreciate John's correction and love having conversations like the one above. I hope The Browser inspires many more conversations!

Found Line on The Browser

See Found Line on The Browser at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday February 11th, 2009) Jason and I will be on Jonathan Butler's new radio show, The Browser. We'll be talking about Found Line, our work, free/open source software, and open standards. We'll also talk a little bit about the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. You can listen to the show at 6:00pm on Burlington, Vermont's local noncommercial low power FM radio station, WOMM-LP 105.9 FM The Radiator. If you're not in listening range you can catch the show online or get the podcast later.

CSS for Web Developers

See CSS for Web Developers at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users Group will be meeting Thursday January 22nd from from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Since we (Found Line) recently had some demolition - I mean renovations - done we've got a bit more space so thought we'd finally host the meeting. Here's a description of the presentation, "CSS for Web Developers", that Jason will be giving:

Most web developers don't consider themselves designers—and shouldn't. The reality of working on a website or web app, however, is that developers must either wear the designer hat or must interface with a designer/design team. Having a solid understanding of design best practices makes for a more efficient process and a higher quality product. Come hear more about web design and CSS from a designer's perspective. We'll cover semantic markup and its influence on CSS implementation, reset and debug stylesheets, tools for creating and debugging CSS, coding standards, and maybe even microformats if time allows. The goal isn't to convert developers into design experts, but rather to give an overview of an effective design process that works for designers and developers alike.

Jason Pelletier is Creative Director and Web Designer for Found Line. The Burlington-based creative firm develops standards-based websites, product packaging and marketing strategies for growing businesses. Clients include Seventh Generation, Vermont Public Radio, EatingWell and True Body Products. Prior to co-founding Found Line, he managed creative resources for Seventh Generation, and was a designer for Stonyfield Farm.

More details here. Please pass this on to others you think might be interested. Pizza will be provided and we will be giving away a "please don't hurt the web - use open standards" t-shirt as well as a copy of Jeffrey Zeldman's book "Designing With Web Standards". Hope to see you there!

PHP Users Group Meeting Tonight

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

Tonight the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group is meeting at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET) from 6pm to 8pm. Josh Sled of MySQL/Sun Microsystems will be presenting on database optimization and tuning. As Matthew Weier O'Phinney pointed out, this meeting will be our one year anniversary of regular meetings. There will be pizza so I hope to see you there!

BTV PHP UG Meeting

See BTV PHP UG Meeting at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users Group will be meeting tomorrow night at Bluehouse Group in Richmond. David Walsh of Standards Technology Group (STG) will be giving a demo of STG's web application. STG will also be providing massive amounts of pizza. Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Software Architect for Zend Framework, will be giving a presentation on using Dojo, a JavaScript framework, within Zend Framework. More details are available here.