I just got the official word that our usual location has changed it’s business hours and will no longer work for our 2:30pm gathering area.
[img align=right]http://www.kcpug.org/site/uploads/img4ec40e2ea2cbb.jpg[/img]
Instead, the fine folks at The Commons – a local Co-working space in Overland Park has offered to host us this weekend. HUGE thanks to Andrew of The Commons for sharing their space!!

So, come on down, see their new digs and let’s talk some PHP (as well as discuss options for our new future home).

More about this weekend’s place:

http://thekccommons.com/

Saturday, November 19th at 2:30 pm

7932 Santa Fe Dr.
Overland Park, KS 66204
Find on [url=http://bit.ly/urIdII]Google Maps[/url]

Even If you aren’t able to make it, feel free to suggest some great ideas for our future spot.

Things I have heard we are looking for:
* Easier access from Downtown, Lawrence, and Johnson County
* Quiet enough for discussions, but not “too dead”
* Good variety – Coffee, beer, tea, maybe snacks
* Projector would be nice for sure
* More “hangout” less “classroom”

I hadn’t been able to get to my laptop since our meeting this weekend, so please fill in details below that I miss.

But, here is an update from our User Group meeting this weekend:

Book Recommendations

Bryan and John recommended some top notch books on Development and OO
[url=http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670]Code Complete[/url]
[url=http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882]CleanCode[/url]
[url=http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X]Pragmatic Programmer[/url]

Remote / Freelance / CoWorking styles

We had some great discussions on enjoying the workday free of the cubicle. We talked briefly about some co-working options and Noah suggested Dan look into the Enterprise Center of Johnson County at 87th and I 35.

Tools of the Trade – Windows edition

We have noticed a possible surge in windows-laptop-based development again. Dan mentioned two tools that have come to save his sanity recently:
[url=http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/]SMTP4Dev[/url] – A local-only smtp server / email mail viewer
[url=http://code.google.com/p/mdesktop/]mdesktop[/url] – fast, clean and light virtual desktops

John Kary – Building a first-class API with Symfony2 and Doctrine’s Behavioral Extensions

[url=http://twitter.com/#!/johnkary]John Kary[/url] walked us through an application he is building for managing links. The project is centered around building a first class API to get, put, post and delete the links as needed by whatever front end client.

He walked us through the tools he was using to test the API (I think he said JAX-RS), but also drilled into his code.

The system used Symfony2 as well as the [url=http://www.doctrine-project.org/blog/doctrine2-behavioral-extensions]Doctrine2 Behavioral Extensions[/url].

It was not only fantastic to see how behaviors were being leveraged to make cleaner, more easily testable code–but also to see some PHP 5.3 in real life! 🙂

Thanks John for the excellent talk!

Daycamp4Developers Giveaway

Congratulations to Our newest member–Andrew! Andrew “Won” our DC4D#3 giveaway. Enjoy the presentations, Andrew!!

There was much more, so if I missed a topic that was near and dear to you–PLEASE add as a comment below!

See you next month!

Byron and Brian kicked us off this month with a great spontaneous discussion into encrypting values rather than storing hashes. (And, I finally got it into my head that Rainbow tables have gotten, really, really big.)

I’ll let them post any links here, etc if they want to reference anything. Otherwise, thank you for the discussion.

I also had a great time delivering my mini-talk on Apache Solr. While, I admit–I’ve been using it just long enough to be a dangerous fanboy, but I’m certainly no expert.

We had a fun time diving into the various aspects of usage, implementation, care and feeding–a great time.

I’ve also uploaded the [url=”http://www.kcpug.org/doghouse/2011_may/kcpug-ApacheSolr.pdf”]Apache SOLR Slides[/url] on the website.

Thanks everyone for the great turnout. See you all next month at the Buzzz!

As I’ve already said…there were a ton of great conversations this month. But, I did grab a few links–not at all an exhaustive list. Feel free to add others. (this was just happened to still be open in my browser).

• Brian is heading to tek-x this next year: http://tek.phparch.com/
• Dan is heading to ZendCon in November: http://zendcon.com
• Looking for some ways to get into test-driven development or just get some practive? Try porting some http://codingkata.org/katas/ to php_unit or your favorite test-suite. Post your test suite to the forums and put us to the challenge as well.
• Munchkin – Learn Greenfield Test-driven development with PHP: http://alternateillusion.com/2010/07/22/munchkin-a-k-a-learn-greenfield-tdd-with-php/

What else did we talk about? Feel free, add to the comments.

Become Famous!!

We had a great meeting today. Thank you all for coming by for the discussions.

I’m also happy to announce the site is (hopefully) back on line. It appears that our 4 month hiatus on the web has to do with our ancient CMS we are using. One day….ONE DAY we will upgrade to something modern.

Feel free to post your suggestions below.

Read more if you want to know the simple solution.

I’m going to go hang my head in shame for leaving our happy home off-line for so long.

See you in October!!

I’m guessing a Dreamhost update changed our longvars setting, so none of the pages were finding the values we were passing. After reading the support wiki on setting up fast cgi, I gave up and just put these at the top of a widely included file.

$HTTP_POST_VARS= $_POST;
$HTTP_GET_VARS = $_GET;
$HTTP_SERVER_VARS= $_SERVER;
$HTTP_FILES = $_FILES;
$HTTP_REQUEST_VARS = $_REQUEST;
$HTTP_SESSION_VARS= $_SESSION;
$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS = $_COOKIE;
$HTTP_ENV_VARS= $_ENV;

/hangs head in shame 🙁

We had a nice rolling conversation this month. Some of the topics that were discussed (in no particular order) were:

[url=http://www.joomlaseo.net/]Joomla in Search Friendly URLs[/url]
[url=http://www.joomla.org/]For more on Joomla[/url]
[url=http://framework.zend.com/apidoc/core/]Zend Framework API Docs[/url] – Looking for the Options for each Zend Form Decorator, Just choose the Zend_Form package, and view the Decorators.
[url=http://v3.kohanaphp.com/download]Kohana 3 “Pre” release[/url]
[url=http://kerkness.ca/wiki]Unoffical Kohana wiki[/url]
[url=http://www.s9y.org/]Serendipity[/url]

As our discussions seemed to revolve around frameworks, you may find some of these recent framework reviews helpful if you are choosing which one you want to try next:

http://designerfoo.com/php-frameworks-first-glimpse-for-beginners.html
[url=http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/tools-of-the-trade-web-development-frameworks-that-the-pros-use/]Server site, client side frameworks[/url]
http://www.noupe.com/php/discussing-php-frameworks.html

Feel free to add more related links to the comments.

Noah pointed out a new MVC framework he has been looking at. Hopefully, he will get some time to play with it soon. Looks super light, and clean.

http://Kohanaphp.com

Eric pointed out some changes he has been seeing in the Zend Framework, especially in a command line system called Zend Tool.

[img]http://devzone.zend.com/images/articles/4559/Picture1.png[/img]

http://devzone.zend.com/article/3811
http://devzone.zend.com/article/4559

Another nice feature of it, is when you create your initial project, you can easily define which stage your project is in. This then controls things like the verbosity of your error pages.

Eric also pointed out that there is a new version of Lime Survey–Now with cool graphs!

Plenty of other chatting going on. Firefox plugins, the future of MySQL, jobs out there, and more.

Hope to see you next month!

This month we had nice chat about:

• [url=http://developer.yahoo.com]developer.yahoo.com[/url], [url=http://developer.yahoo.com/yui]developer.yahoo.com/yui/[/url], [url=http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/]pipes.yahoo.com[/url]
• [url=http://www.limesurvey.org]www.limesurvey.org[/url]
• [url=http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads/]Eclipse PDT[/url] – IDE for PHP with Debugging
• [url=http://wordpress.org/]wordpress.org[/url]
• [url=http://www.joomla.org/]joomla.org[/url]
• [url=http://drupal.org/]Drupal[/url]