If you're already making plans to attend this year's php|tek conference (2009) then Matthew Turland has a question for you:

Think you might like for a Hackathon to be included in the Unconference? (Or want to know more about what such an event would entail?)

If you'd like to get in on the discussion, there's already a Google group set up that you can join to keep up with the latest. The group just started up , so there's not a whole lot of content there yet so go over any voice your opinion on the matter. Oh, and if you're looking for a quick and easy URL that'll get you there, use http://tinyurl.com/tek09hackathon.

The PHP Women site has posted an interview with one of their members from this year's ZendCon - Lise Driggers.

While at ZendCon I stole some time from the schedule of Lise Driggers, one of the female attendees I met there, to ask her a bit about herself and how she got to where she is today. Lise works for Timptech in Vancouver, migrating their existing i-series applications (also known as AS400 or "green screen") to flex, using PHP to communicate between PHP and the database.

They talk about how she got started with PHP, career paths, interaction with the PHP community and some other hobbies she has.

Check out the interviews category on the phpwomen.org website for more interviews with members and the founders of the group.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a recording (from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2008) of the UnConference session user group panel discussion.

Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.

You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

According to this recent post to the Ibuildings blog, the company is going to strike out and try something new - a "Center of Expertise" department as a part of their normal business operations.

This year we're going to do something similarly challenging, but completely different. We've grown from a development company into a PHP services company, and we managed to attract really smart and inspiring people from the PHP community. We've also been supporting user groups and organized conferences and seminars. We're about to take those activities to the next level. We are going to build a 'PHP Center of Expertise'.

Efforts the newly formed group will contribute to include open source projects, aiding user groups, developing training materials and developing professional services related to PHP. The idea is still in the planning stages so any feedback or comments you might have are welcome.

The Zend Developer Zone has a reminder for those in the Amsterdam area - the phpGG user group (newly formed) will be having their next meeting on September 23rd.

On Tuesday 23 September 2008 the Dutch PHP user group will have its first meeting, in what will become a bi-monthly event. The goal is have meetings with other members, enjoy some coffee and tea and meeting other developers and the chance of prizes to win.

Two speakers will be presenting from about 8pm to 10:30pm - you can find out more about the group and the meeting from their site, including how to get there.

Mike Naberezny has posted about some improvements that were made to the PHPUnit testing software lately (support for TestNG-style groupings) and how, with a few of his own suggestions it was made a bit more flexible.

At my company, we typically organize our test case classes into high-level groups such as unit and functional. Method-level group annotations are inconvenient for us because we'd need to annotate every method of every test case class.

He includes an example of their use - commenting a testing class and running it through the phpunit command line tool with a call to the testing group's name.

In the third part of the series dealing with using Doctrine in your PHP applications, ProDevTips has this third part looking at a method for extending the tool's current functionality.

I simply knew we would need the extension capability that the Mdl class allows for sooner or later, I didn't expect it to be this soon though. The main problem here is saving a many to many relationship straight to the database from the $_POST array, to do that we can extend Doctrine Record with a new function I have named fromArrayExt which adds something extra to the normal fromArray method.

He shows how to extend the classes to create custom handlers for a grouping of checkboxes. The new code automatically handles their submitted values and pushes them directly into the database (with a simple save() call).

A new entry has been posted to the PEAR blog with the latest minutes for the group's July 13th meeting.

Some highlights from the meeting include new/upcoming RFCs for package naming schemes, exception handling in PHP 5.3, and a vote on extending the current PEAR2 Policies. Heavy stuff, check it out!

You can check out the full notes here on the PEAR portion of the PHP.net wiki.

This new post from the Mind Tree blog (at hurricanesoftware.com) asks the question "why do you care about friendly URLs in PHP applications?"

Nice URLs, readable URLs, search-engine-friendly URLs. Different names same deal. [...] Turns out this isn't all that hard with PHP - in fact it can turn into something that's very useful from more than just a readability viewpoint.

He shows how to use mod_rewrite and an .htaccess file to automatically grab the request and map it to the right place. Then, the PHP script looks at the incoming data and pushes the correct page back out to the browser. He's also included some modifications to the original idea that allow for numeric grouping and named groups for rewriting content.