Topic: Technology Marketing and PHP Design Patterns: your first 5

 

Today's powerful Technology Tools allow us to communicate like never before, integrating both art and science to deliver dynamic measurable results for marketing initiatives. 1 to 1 marketing, Web2Print (W2P) and Personal URLs will provide greater response and interaction, this along with aggressive customer data collection create an environment for success. Todd Thompson kicks off this business and intro section with talk about Technology Marketing. Todd Thompson is the Director of Digital at ScanGroup in Waukesha.

First part: Open Talk

After the great response we had to last meetup's open talk, we're going to do it one more time. This time it's on a Monday - so we're hoping to have even more of a crowd. Aaron will facilitate introductions and the floor will be open to most dicussions. Last meetup we spoke about what was most challening, where each member was in their PHP knowledge, what was some new exciting projects they were working on and more.

Second part: Joel Clermont presents
Title: What's new and exciting in PHP 5.3?

 First half: Open QA

Joel Clermont and Aaron Saray will be leading an open Question/Answer section. Have a bit of code that is stumping you? Bring it! Need some suggestions on some different tools? Let's share. Just know where to go 'from here', we can cover that too. This will be a pretty informal portion - similar to our previous on Developer Best Practices / Tips and Tricks.

Second half - Arlen Walker: The Saga of Tracker 9725

Showing the trials of adding unit tests to decade-old legacy code from an Open Source project which was designed and written without testing in mind. We'll cover some approaches to testing legacy code, some test "smells," breaking dependencies, and along the way show how adding the tests led to "discovering" bug #9725 and fixing it without looking for it.

Kevin Schroeder - Technology Evangelist from Zend

Check him out at http://www.eschrade.com/ or @kpschrade.

 

Presenter: Kevin Schroeder - Technology Evangelist from Zend. During our first hour Kevin Schroeder will show and demonstrate the capabilities of various Zend products as well as talk about Zend’s open source and community contributions. We will look at the new Zend Studio 8.0, which is currently in public beta, Zend Server, and demonstrating such features and Job Queues, Event Monitoring and Code Tracing.

Second hour deep dive into how to build a Zend Framework-based application, showing several Zend Framework components. Freebies! Raffling off a license for Zend Studio. $100 off Zendcon admission vouchers for anyone interested who attends.

Group will be meeting at La Perla pre-meetup for dinner so stop on by!

 

Beginner / Business Presentation
Kforce and Christa Schroeder, Technology Recruiter and Aaron Stratman, Market Director
Kforce will provide an overview of both their organization and the current marketplace. In addition, provide resume writing tips and other ideas to prepare you for a job search. Please bring your questions as they would be happy to answer anything specific you might have as well. The time will be split between Kforce/The Marketplace/Working with Recruiters, Resume Writing and Open Questions.

Advanced / Tips and Tricks Presentation
PHPed IDE by NuSphere
Greg Ryan
PHPed by NuSphere provides an integrated editing, debugging and
profiling tool for the development of PHP code. Built-in browsers,
MySQL monitors and server side debugging allow the programmer to step,
monitor and evaluate code on a line by line basis with watch and break
points. Although not an open source product, the capability and
advantages that the product offers may make the purchase of a licence
an easy decision.
PHPed runs on a Windows or Linux platform and can run on Mac via Wine
or Parallels.

SPONSOR!!
Kforce is bringing Pizza - so come hungry! Were you wondering what Kforce is? WEll...
Kforce (Nasdaq:KFRC) is a professional staffing and solutions firm providing contract and permanent staffing solutions in the specialty skill areas of: Information Technology, Finance & Accounting, Healthcare and Government Solutions. Kforce has over 1,900 staffing specialists across 63 offices in 41 markets in North America and two in the Philippines, bringing the value of over 45 years of experience to your career development needs. Locally to Wisconsin, we have offices in Milwaukee and Madison with an impressive team of over 25 staffing specialists.

MKEPUG's organizers are still working on the schedule for this event. But keep an eye on the site and we'll update with fresh information hot off the presses as soon as we receive it.

 

Discussion: Best Practices, Tips, and Questions
For the first time, we're going to change up the format of the meetup. For about 90 minutes (with a quick break), we're going to discuss some of our best practices, tips and work flows. Share what has worked for you - share what hasn't. Talk about what programs and scripts you use to save time. Bring questions to the group to find out better ways to do what you're doing. The discussion will be lead by a "moderator" who will bring up topics as well as ask you for your own. Hope to see you there.

Beginner: Jim Raffel Presents Selling the Dream

The largest business deals I have put together are never quantity
purchases of ColorMetrix or ProofPass.com. Instead while talking with a
customer or prospect I see a need or the customer sees a use of the
technology that goes beyond the current functionality. This is when it
gets fun. Instead of selling a piece of technology now I am selling a
dream of what the technology will do for the client in the future.

Advanced: Paul Lyon Presents Plesk Control Panel Integration
Plesk is a Hosting Control panel build on PHP. Paul will show a few ways he's interfaced with Plesk including a Drupal module he wrote.

Mike McCallister

Analyzing a Wordpress Plugin: A Collaborative Experience
In WordPress in Depth, Mike McCallister analyzes FollowMe, a popular and simple WordPress plugin written in PHP that allows the readers of your blog to follow you on Twitter. We'll repeat this exercise, in hopes that everyone (including the presenter) can pick up tips on how to code and comment.

YUI and multiple image uploads will not be presented tonight.