We had a fantastic initial PHP UG meeting last night. Darren Cooper had acquired the use of a computer lab at FH (University of Applied Sciences) and nine people showed up. After a bit of chit-chat, getting to know each other and looking through the books that different people had brought with them, we had 2 presentations.
Using material prepared by Toby, Stephan Schmidt and Aidan, I presented PEAR and gave a quick overview of some of the interesting packages (HTML_Quickform, MDB2, Error/Error_Stack), as well as a quick look at PECL things (PDO, XMLWriter, and Tidy). Darren gave the next presentation about using COM with PHP to write a front end for Microsoft’s Index Server. A very nice talk which covered some rarely-seen PHP goodness, as well as some not-entirely-evil stuff from Microsoft.
After the discussing our next meeting, and getting a “volunteer” to update the website, we headed off to a local bar for a couple drinks and a lot more PHP talk.
We have a couple talks lined up for the next few meetings, one on Webservices in PHP5, Thorsten volunteered to give an “off-topic” talk on issues surrounding the creation of an online radio station, and there was a possibility for a talk on indexing documents using non-windows based platforms.
This meeting re-enforced the fact in my mind, that you don’t need to go to exotic conferences to hear about how PHP coders are using cutting edge technology in their everyday work. More than likely there is someone doing something cool right where you are, if not, then they probably think what you are doing is cool. Either way, find where they are, put together a couple presentations (as opposed to just chatting and drinking beer), and have fun.
So when’s your next UG meeting?