November Topic: Got a problem? We’ve got answers!

Got a bug that’s been nagging you for hours? How about a feature that you just can’t seem to implement? This month at Atlanta PHP, we’re diverging from our usual presentation format and opening the floor for a “round table” discussion about development problems you are facing.

So, feel free to bring your coding problems to us, and as a group, we’ll come up with the solutions. Bring your laptop or a thumb drive containing snippets/samples of your code or application, so we can look at it as a group. This is sure to be a learning experience for us all.

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.

PHP Basics at the Atlanta Web Design Group Meetup on November 11

On November 11 at 7:00pm, Matthew Turland will speak to the Atlanta Web Design Group about PHP, covering basics of the language and best practices from a designer’s perspective. This will include basic output, variables, conditional branches, loops, output modularization using includes, coding style, and escaping output for security purposes.

Matthew is the Lead Programmer for a Web application service provider, is Zend PHP Certified, and works with PHP and MySQL on a daily basis. He’s also a member of the PHP Community organization and serves as an organizer for the Acadiana Open Source Group. You can also read his blog at http://ishouldbecoding.com/.

There will be a 30-40 minute presentation followed by Q&A and discussion.

You must RSVP at Meetup.com for this meeting.

php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta November 12-14!

Atlanta PHP invites you to join us at php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta, GA November 12 through 14!

Atlanta PHP user group members receive $100 off the price of registration!

The publishers of php|architect and Python Magazine, are proud to invite you to php|works and PyWorks, two great conferences that will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA, between November 12 and November 14.

With over 65 talks in 5 tracks, 10 tutorials and great networking events and parties, php|works and PyWorks represent a unique opportunity to not only hone your technical skills, but also meet and interact with members of a vibrant community of developers from all walks of life. And remember—your attendance fee covers access to both conferences!

We will resume our regularly scheduled meetings on Thursday, November 6th. We hope to see you there!

Now, for a few announcements:

BarCamp is returning to Atlanta this year. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. BarCamp Atlanta will take place on October 17-18, 2008 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia Tech ATDC in Midtown. There is only space for 300 participants, so be sure to sign up early!

Atlanta PHP invites you to join us at php|works and PyWorks in Atlanta, GA November 12 through 14!

Atlanta PHP user group members receive $100 off the price of registration!

The publishers of php|architect and Python Magazine, are proud to invite you to php|works and PyWorks, two great conferences that will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA, between November 12 and November 14.

With over 65 talks in 5 tracks, 10 tutorials and great networking events and parties, php|works and PyWorks represent a unique opportunity to not only hone your technical skills, but also meet and interact with members of a vibrant community of developers from all walks of life. And remember—your attendance fee covers access to both conferences!

Atlanta PHP user group members receive $100 off the price of registration!

Free training when you sign up!

Sign up for any conference + tutorial day package before September 27 and receive complimentary access to one of our training classes free of charge—a $900 value yours completely free!

For more information, visit our Specials Page

The publishers of php|architect and Python Magazine, are proud to invite you to php|works and PyWorks, two great conferences that will take place in Atlanta, GA, USA, between November 12 and November 14.

With over 65 talks in 5 tracks, 10 tutorials and great networking events and parties, php|works and PyWorks represent a unique opportunity to not only hone your technical skills, but also meet and interact with members of a vibrant community of developers from all walks of life. And remember—your attendance fee covers access to both conferences!

Here’s a brief, partial selection of some of the great talks that will be presented at php|works and PyWorks:

• Matthew Weier O’Phinney: Rich UIs with Zend Framework and Dojo
• Sebastian Bergmann: Lambdas, closures and traits in PHP
• Sara Golemon: Simple scaling every developer should know
• Travis Swicegood: Introduction to Git
• Mark Ramm: Building Web Applications with TurboGears
• Michael Foord: IronPython: Python on .NET
• Morgan Tocker: Performance Tuning MySQL
• Chris Shiflett: Security-Centered Design
• D. Keith Casey, Jr.: Mobilizing the Web

You can find the complete schedule for both conferences here.

With attendance fees starting as low as $499 per person, special hotel deals and a location that is just minutes by one of the most accessible international airports in the world, php|works and PyWorks are your chance to be part of a unique learning experience!

Sign up today—don’t miss out!

Presentation: Rickroll To Go With PHP, WURFL, and Other Open Source Tools

Want to get that wallpaper on your iPhone or that Rick Astley video on your Nokia N95? In a world where mobile content is becoming more prevalent by the day, how can we enhance the experience of gathering images, audio and video for consumption on mobile devices?

Brian will demonstrate how you can leverage the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL), PHP, ImageMagick, ffmpeg, and other open source tools to optimize content for consumption on mobile devices.

Our own Brian DeShong to present.

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.

When: Thursday, August 14, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Join-Fu: The Art of SQL

Jay Pipes, the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL and co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), joins us this month to present “Join-Fu: The Art of SQL.”

Join-fu is the art of performance-tuning your application’s SQL. Join Jay in a fun, irreverent look at the common ways application developers misuse and abuse their database.

Topics covered include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu’s ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
• Working with N:M or “mapping” tables
  • Dealing with OR conditions
  • Dealing with AND conditions
  • Combatting filesorts using Cross-join-fu
• Understanding Left-join-fu
• Handling Heirarchical Data
  • Adjacency Lists
  • Nested Sets
• Doing GIS calculations in SQL
  • Without using user variables, the spatial extensions or stored functions
  • Calculating distance between two points
  • Doing radius searches in spherical geometries
• Reporting techniques in SQL
  • Calculating running sums and aggregates
  • Calculating rank of results

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.

When: Thursday, August 14, 2008—7pm-9pm
Where: Consulate General of Canada

Presentation: Join-Fu: The Art of SQL

Jay Pipes, the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL and co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), joins us this month to present “Join-Fu: The Art of SQL.”

Join-fu is the art of performance-tuning your application’s SQL. Join Jay in a fun, irreverent look at the common ways application developers misuse and abuse their database.

Topics covered include:

• Schema optimization and vertical partitioning
• SQL Coding style guidelines
• Set-wise problem solving in SQL (and why it kicks for-loop-fu’s ass.)
  • Rewriting correlated subqueries into joins
  • Using derived tables or subqueries in the FROM clause
• Working with N:M or “mapping” tables
  • Dealing with OR conditions
  • Dealing with AND conditions
  • Combatting filesorts using Cross-join-fu
• Understanding Left-join-fu
• Handling Heirarchical Data
  • Adjacency Lists
  • Nested Sets
• Doing GIS calculations in SQL
  • Without using user variables, the spatial extensions or stored functions
  • Calculating distance between two points
  • Doing radius searches in spherical geometries
• Reporting techniques in SQL
  • Calculating running sums and aggregates
  • Calculating rank of results

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.

Join us again on August 7th at our regularly scheduled time when special guest Jay Pipes, North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL, presents on “Join-fu: The Art of SQL.”

More details coming soon.

Topic: PHP Templates the XSL Way

When developing a web application a common question is, “what templating engine should I use?” There are several to choose from if you’re using PHP, including PHP itself. In this presentation we’ll explore XSL and how it can be used to build a templating engine in PHP. James Logsdon presents.

Mini-Talk: TBD

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.

TestFest 2008 Workshop

We are hosting an additional workshop in May for the PHP TestFest! This is a BYOL (bring your own laptop) workshop. WiFi, food, and drinks will be provided. Please RSVP at meetup.com, so we can get an accurate head count.

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt 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.

Location

TAKE NOTE: We are meeting in a different location for this workshop! Our meeting takes place at the Schematic Atlanta offices at the Millennium in Midtown building (at the corner of 10th and West Peachtree streets). Click here for directions. You will need to sign in with security in the lobby.

Topic: TestFest 2008

Ever wanted to get involved in the PHP development team but were unsure of where to start? Perhaps you’re not exactly a great C developer, so you weren’t even aware that your help could be valuable? Well, you don’t need to be a C developer to aid the PHP development team, nor do you need to do any fancy compiling or building. You can write phpt tests!

The month of May has been designated as TestFest 2008 for PHP user groups around the world. This month, PHP user groups will work to improve the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. Aside from having the opportunity to help in improving the language itself, PHP.net will also raffle off 10 elePHPants to submitters. Every submission (phpt 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.

The Atlanta PHP May meeting will be dedicated to TestFest 2008, introducing the concept of phpt tests and how to write them.

Mini-Talk: Easy Loader Generation

We’ve all seen those nifty animated loading images on Ajaxified Web 2.0 sites, but how do we create them? Eric Stewart shows us how with “a neat little tool for making a quick little AJAX loading gif.”

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.