As this new post on the symfony blog points out, their next Plugin Developers Day is happening this weekend on Saturday, November 8th.
Preparations for the coming plugin developers day on Nov. 8th are proceeding apace. I've heard from a number of you who are planning to attend, some planning to start development on new, groudbreaking plugins, others looking to help update existing plugins to work with the latest and greatest version of symfony, and still others just hoping to learn from the lively discussion. All types are welcome!
The event will be centered around the #symfony channel on the Freenode IRC network and is broken up into different sections - creating and releasing a plugin, writing a customizable plugin and coding sprints on new/existing plugins.
The PHP Women group has celebrated their second birthday this past Friday (October 24th) and have seen tons of progress of women in the PHP community during that time. This includes:
Representation at conferences
Continued success with our Big Sis Mentorship Program
Growth in our IRC channel
Formalizing our non-profit status
Encouraging women to submit CfPs and to be published
So stop by wish them a happy birthday and see what they're all about!
Kris Wallsmith has posted an announcement to the symfony blog about an upcoming event (happening Saturday November 8th from 3pm-9pm GMT) - Plugin Developers Day.
We will cover a number of plugin-related subjects in depth, including creating and naming a plugin, adding customizable model, form and action classes, unit and functional testing a plugin, packaging and releasing, and what's new in symfony 1.2.
If you've been meaning to try your hand at writing a symfony plugin or have been writing plugins for years, please join some of your fellow developers for a day of learning, collaboration and development.
Its an online event that'll be happening in the #symfony IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network. Nothing to sign up for - just show up ready to learn.
Chuck Burgess has a quick post pointing out the next "PEAR triage days":
PEAR's next Bug Triage days are this weekend: Saturday 4 PM - 9 PM UTC and Sunday 4 PM - 10 PM UTC.
You can find the schedule and more information about joining in at this page on the PEAR wiki. You can find others working on the triage on the EFNet's IRC network in the #pear-bugs channel.
Matthew Turlandcame across someone having an issue running his PHP-based IRC bot (Phergie) an an environment where the exec function wasn't allowed:
This causes a warning in the Quit plugin, which uses exec to automatically detection of the full path to the PHP CLI binary on non-Windows systems that it will later use that path to initiate a new PHP CLI process to "restart" the bot.
It check this setting for the future, it was recommended that he look at the SPL ReflectionFunction class (a part of the Standard PHP Library) that would let him check the disabled status of any PHP function (looking at the result of the isDisabled call).
Matthew Turland notes that the second part of his "IRC Bots in PHP" series of articles has been posted to the C7Y community site (from php|architect).
The precursor to this article introduced some background and an overview of the design for the Phergie project as an example of the concepts involved in a PHP IRC bot implementation. This article will go further into the topic of plugins including descriptions of those that are commonly needed to make a bot fully functional as well as the commonly needed core features to support plugin development.
In part one he set up some of the foundation code and explained some of the thought behind the structure of the bot. In this part he gets more into the heart of the bot, showing how to define functions for common IRC actions (join/part/ping/etc) and how he made a plugin system to handle custom actions. He also mentions topics like memory usage, data storage methods and some of the "niceties" he included.
Matthew Turland set out a while back to develop a bot in PHP. The result of it is Phergie an "an IRC bot written in PHP 5 with an OO API" that can be extended with components for a wide variety of features. Another pleasant offshoot from his project is this first part of two articles on the C7Y community site detailing its creation.
The PHP Community channel on the Freenode IRC network, #phpc, had a longstanding bot called "Ai". Like many bots at the time of her creation, she was based on PHP 4. [...] With the coming end-of-life of PHP 4 and at the encouragement of channel users, I decided to start a project to develop a new bot based on PHP 5 that would fully utilize its new object model and offer users a chance to contribute to the bot they used in their channel.
Matthewtalks about the initial stages of development (planning, research) and some of the development process of the bootstrap file, configuration file, and driver as well as the event handling.
The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.
Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.
You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.
Matthew Turland has been working on a project based on an idea he and Ben Ramsey thought up - a wrapper around the libircclient libraries to make IRC interface simple. As a result, Matthew turned it into a more practical application - you can call her Phergie.
I had toyed with some previous iterations of Phergie, some Python-based and later some PHP-based, before I finally got an API design I was happy with.
The source for the bot can be downloaded from its subversion repository and you can find out more about it on its Trac site. Also, if you feel like chatting about it, you can head over to the #phergie channel on the Freenode IRC network.
The CakePHP podcast "The Show" has released their latest episode, a wrapup of the recent CakeFest 2008 conference that finished a few days ago.
Jeff Loiselle, Nate Abele, Mariano Iglesias, Peter Vanhee, Antonio De Marco, Paul Kruger, Timo Derstappen, Frederic Bollon, and Yann Le Blevac wrap up CakeFest at 1am in the hotel lobby.
You can either grab the mp3 directly or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and other great episodes as they come out. The Show is recorded live and listeners can ask questions of the hosts in real-time via the CakePHP channel on the Freenode IRC network.
