* Install OpenID plugin
* Active OpenID plugin
* In the open ID settings change the user to be Subscriber, have all other options off we don’t care about people needing a password to comment here.

* Set up wordpress install to accept new accounts.Settings->membership->anyone can register

* Install Role Scoper http://agapetry.net/
* Activate Role Scoper

* Install Adminimise
* Activate Adminimise
* In the Adminimise options deactivate everything in the write options for the Page.

Create a page that you want people to edit.
Before you publish scroll down to the Editors section from Role Scoper and set it on for Subscriber.

Go to the template and add some code to add the open ID for that page.

<?php
if ((get_the_title() == "Schedule" && !$user_ID)) { //
$editLink="wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=".get_the_ID();
print "<form name=\"loginform\" id=\"loginform\" action=\"/wp-login.php\" method=\"post\">";
print "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"redirect_to\" value=\"".$editLink."\">";
openid_wp_login_form();
print "<input id=\"wp-submit\" type=\"submit\" tabindex=\"100\" value=\"Log In\" name=\"wp-submit\"/>";
print "</form>";
}
?>

It was unfortunate that at PHP Conference UK the speaker from Adobe, Mihai Corlan, decided to add inappropriate material into his talk, namely a mostly naked woman strutting across his screen. Mihai played with the application making delighted noises, and when he was done, he brought her out again. I personally don’t find it offensive but I cringed because I know many people do. It’s a bit like looking back at the 50s and seeing all the behavior that was considered normal back then that wouldn’t be tolerated today.

Lets keep such things out of our technical communities and events. A similar mistake was made in Australia at Linux events and people of different religions, cultures etc. and people who just don’t appreciate that kind of behavior in public complained. Mary wrote up some great tips for organisers about such things. It turned out many people in the audience were made uncomfortable and some offended at the time in this Adobe presentation but didn’t feel comfortable speaking up about it until later.

Worse still these paying participants felt they did not get anything out of this presentation because they were unable to concentrate after this happened. I hope the Adobe presenter Mihai Corlan was made aware that this is not appropriate for a technical presentation. Finally I hope conference organisers will take more care to make their presenters aware of some guidelines so not to offend or make attendees uncomfortable in the future.

I was tagged by Ken Guest to share seven random/weird things about myself.

1. Apparently I first met my husband at Linux Conf Au, 2001 (Jan 2001) but I only remember meeting him for the first time at the Sydney Linux User Group meetings. We got to know each other over many events over the next six plus months, however we didn’t go on our first date until July 2001, Jan hired a car and we drove 300km away from Sydney, to a cocktail party in Canberra, ACT
2. I first used PHP to write the software for my Thesis, I wrote a web based application for children to collaborate ideas and come up with an invention in small groups to then present to the whole class. I picked PHP at random, ignoring languages I already knew and had used during my degree. I’ve pretty much worked with it ever since
3. I sometimes wear a communicator while we’re watching Star Trek - my favourite series is Voyager
4. I’m a natural blonde, something a lot of people I’ve met in the last year don’t know or realise, because I dye my hair dark now
5. My hobbies include Travel, Reading (mostly Fantasy), Photography and Scrapbooking, I’m active in the Irish paper crafting scene
6. I love the outdoors Camping, Swimming, Fishing but I don’t do them since moving to Europe at all, I would rather live in the countryside, except I love the events and activities that happen in cities.
7. I once, as part of a small team, had to count the lightbulbs in the whole of our university, UNSW, this included monitors and fax machines, it was to figure out how many were left on when no one was inside, most were on.

Tagging Others
I’m going to wuss out with just three people, because I’m not really into this sort of thing, it was a compliment to get tagged by Ken though, and has been pretty interesting getting to know a bit more about the developers whose blogs I read.

• Laura Czajkowski - She’s organising OSSBarCamp here which should be a great event - I’m trying to help her and she always deserves a shout out!.
• Stella Power - First other PHP chick I heard about here in Ireland, and I’m curious to learn more about her
• Gita Malinovska - I find her blog posts interesting because she’s new to running her own business, and bettering herself daily, by learning ways to improve herself and the business. I have a goal to go back to working for myself some day.

Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Wow there doesn’t seem to be any other PHP developers out there
It may be that most PHP developers are freelancers. Due to the competitive nature of the business they don’t want to get together to discuss for fear they will lose customers. Why socialise with the enemy. Most freelancers get work by word of mouth. Actually wouldn’t this make it better to get together with others to share work when there’s too much? Hopefully the user groups can promote the idea that sharing information and working as a community is good for the industry for EVERYONE. There is a suspicion that more developers are out there and don’t ever hear about the user groups because there isn’t enough marketing.

Another problem is there isn’t normally PHP development shops set up. I know there are a lot of examples but this is a perception when comparing PHP development to JAVA for example.

Finally Developers may come from being hobbiests or from being designers so don’t know the channels to join the PHP world, and therefore don’t end up finding out about the user groups.

Things that discourage developers to come along

• Being too far away
• Being at a bad time of day, too early or too late
• the members being a clique
• Not having a regular time and place can be too confusing
• members being too experienced - The high level talk that occurs is scary for newbies
• Lots of talking - no doing - People want to get out and do things in the community and get frustrated with talking only

Ideas for User Groups

• Do more hands on stuff like the bug hunting days - Take a look at the bug lists of frameworks out there, get some more advanced or involved developers to come along and explain how to go about triaging and making patches.
• Discover and explore open source applications together, show newbies how to get involved in the project, help them dig into it and make changes.
• Encourate regular users to present, give everyone a turn, sure some may not be so good at speaking but who knows.
• Run events/workshops specifically aimed at newbies, people starting out
• Explain the path of the PHP developer from newbie to guru
• Invite speakers - Adobe, Zend, IBuildings, people from open source projects
• Set up as a non for profit organisation based around the user group - this helps companies make donations and in some countries be able to claim the donation against taxes.
• Have a mother site for the country or area then this will point people to specific area user group websites. Umbrella groups and Sub groups or chapters.
• Use the tools of the web - twitter, facebook, mailing lists, IRC, forums
• have your user group site come up on google for [country]+PHP or [city]+PHP
• Organise Events / Conferences
• Have social events based around pizza, coffee or beer
• Make sure to get feedback from the community, what do they want? What do they like and dislike about what you’re currently doing

Why PHP Users groups are good for you

• Speaking at a user group is great for your career, showing that you know something.
• Help you become a better developer
• they give you access to tools
• Give you access to contacts for payment or to work together on projects
• The presentations can be very informative and introduce you to new concepts
• It helps grow PHP as a viable technology for the whole community
• As a freelancer belonging to a usergroup can help with sharing contracting work between the group.

PHP User Groups and the Sponsors

• Sponsors can help the user groups by centralising the conference/event organising efforts - e.g. Mark de Visser mentioned as part of the ZendCon conference process they were sent in many excess talk proposals, it would be great if the local user groups could access the good speakers that lived locally
• Sponsors can help advertise user group events - if they are sending out a newsletter to PHP developers they could send them information about PHP community events in their area
• In return the community can refer people to the companies e.g. about certification, services, products, information, training
• User Groups need to let sponsors know exactly what they will get for their buck, how many people attend events, how many on mailing list, topics that come up, how they will be presented at the event. Concrete Facts
• Recruiters may want lists and job boards, access to people changing jobs
• Charities may be interested in sharing resources because of the open source aspect of PHP, and the fact they may have access to open source specialists for their own needs. Example premises for holding events.
• The user groups need to remember to request stuff, not just sit around waiting for items and sponsorship to flood in
• Remember to thanks sponsors (on mailing lists, at the event) and come good on the promises/agreements

Sponsorship Ideas and Tips

• Books from publishers e.g. O’Reilly
• Recruitment companies
• Companies that use PHP - PIZZA!! or BEER!! or COFFEE!!
• Zend - Training, Studio, Products, Vouchers, Certifications
• PHP|Architect - Magazines, Training, Books
• Sugar CRM
• Ibuildings
• Universities - Space - Attendees from student community
• Sponsors may want one of their staff to do a talk, for example a new author may want to do the circuit or a consulting company may want to promote their knowledge
• Borland
• Local PHP hosting companies

Promoting the PHP User Groups

• Get onto master user group sites for your local area
• get your events onto php.net
• Share presentations among the user groups in your area
• PHPClasses shows maps and lists
• PHPusergroups - though may be unmaintained and events not vetted
• Future Idea - having php.net tell people about events in their area by map

Other Notes

• People that come to PHP User Groups are usually there individually, they aren’t being sent by their employers
• The PHP User Groups that were represented have around 30 people attending meetings/lectures regularly.
• Dalas had a nice thing going where they would have a follow up event after a talk at a coffee shop/book store to discuss the ideas further.
• People come for what they can immediately gain e.g. a talk on a specific topic. and stay for the networking

Again, these are notes I have made while listening to the podcast made at Zendcon unconference session about PHP user groups I hope they are useful to you.

Do you have any other tips for PHP User Groups?

At work I’ve been learning more about PHP, SEO, Design Patterns and computer science in general, It has been a thrill to be learning and pushed forwards again. Working for myself saw me doing things the same way too often because the problems I was presented with weren’t as challenging, original or new.

I’m very interested in how to integrate the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) best practices into the software development process so that it all just becomes a natural way of doing things. I think the most interesting thing for me has been how much material there is to read and how little it really says. I’m trying to just pull out the key points and this is more difficult than it should be. Hopefully it will be rewarding though, and that all the work I’m doing will make some change in how we all do our work. Ofcourse SEO is generally rewarding because as the “right way” of doing things are implemented the site will do better in the search engines because they look better to robots AND as a side effect they’ll be easier for humans to use them too.

With design patterns the funniest thing was finding I have used quite a few of them but didn’t know there was a name for designing code in that way. I’m happy to learn more about them now, learn them off by heart and probably even remember the titles for them. I enjoyed this article about the Strategy and Factory patterns.

I’ve been reading Ivo Jansch’s “Guide to Enterprise PHP Development” and I attended an IBuildings lecture a few weeks ago(IBuildings is a pretty cool company huh?). Anyway I’m very interested in the part about training employees to be more efficient in the same way you’d optiimse and fine tune a server that wasn’t running at it’s best. On this note I’m doing research into training, certification, conferences and tools for making myself more efficient at work. I’ll be studying for my MySQL Developer Certification soon and I can’t wait to learn anything new I can about that either.

As part of learning more about Enterprise PHP I’ve done some investigation into frameworks. I’ve always liked the idea of creating my own set of tools to share among all my code. I plan to read more about Zend and PEAR over the coming months and hopefully use them too. The main tool I’ve been working to improve is my editor, and to hopefully use an IDE - I’m interested in this because currently I use Notepad++ on windows. For the last week or so I’ve been struggling to work with Zend Studio with no success, I think mostly because of the large amount of code I’m trying to introduce to it. I’m not sure what advantage I’d have with Zend Studio over Notepad++, I believe my next step will be to try eclipse with PDT.

In conclusion I hope to improve the way I do things and learn as much more as I can over the coming months to be a better developer in the future. I also hope I can document my thoughts as I go to help other people along the way as well.

Facebook has announced that it will open it’s international headquarters in Dublin. I wonder what this means for me as a web developer.

I’m hoping it means they hire a bunch of PHP developers and the Irish PHP User Group Flourishes. Hopefully with more large companies around that use PHP we’ll have a great community to help build our own skills and contacts. I can’t wait to go along to some technical event held by Facebook!

I have been finding Facebook less important to me than I initially thought it would be. However I read that Facebooks traffic is up 50% over the last year on Search Engine Watch. I was an early adopter of Facebook and I was excited. Now I feel the need for something much better to come along something more relavent to me and my life.

Will Facebook the website become more relavent to me now that it has a headquarters in Europe? In thinking about their announcement I assessed how I use Facebook lately. I open the website in the morning and at night, and after pressing ignore on all the applications and strange things people invite me to I then flick to my Friends section where I read what people have been up to. Once a week or so I check out the feeds to see other peoples comments and photos and such. I wish I didn’t have to go to Facebook for this, I wish it was more integrated into my life, part of my igoogle desktop or something like that (ofcourse facebook can provide these services).

On that note I think I’ve been becoming happy about the Tech community here in Dublin. With the Irish PHP User Group, Irish Linux User Group, Open Coffee, Geek Girl Dinners, Ruby User Group and work events, Ireland has felt more like the Technical Capital of Europe I imagned before I arrived.

Finally I will do some more investigation on how Facebook works, how PHP is involved and the chances of PHP developer community growing in Ireland.

What does Facebook opening their International headquarters in Dublin mean to you?

I’ve been working for Web Reservations International a few months now. Recently I got involved in investigating conferences as part of a plan to encourage the continued professional development of the technical team. Note that the last part, the description is what I found interesting about the conference, they have more stuff going on there than I listed. Also remember I’m located in Dublin so the locations are a bit biased too. Please give me feedback:
* If you have been to any of the confs let me know and tell me what you thought.
* If you have any opinions on any of the conferences mentions.
* If you notice any obvious ommisions.
* About the conference/professional development in your work place/profession.

Anyway here are the conferences I found split up into groups (Design, javascript, PHP, Java, Systems, Other):

Design

• Fronteers - Amsterdam - September - CSS, XML, JAVASCRIPT, OOD, HTML 5, IE8, SEO
• dConstruct - Brighton England - September - Design Social Networks
• @Media - London- May - Design, Content management, business practices
• Future of Web Design - London in April New York in November - Design, Javascript, Community
• Adobe Max (Europe) 2008 - Milan, Italy- Dec 1-4 - Adobe Products (Photoshop, illustrator, fireworks), Design Concepts, Cross media design, brand experience, accessibility
• Web Design World 2008 - Boston, USA- December - Communities, Hype, New technologies, CSS, Javascript, Social Media, SEO
• Interaction 09 -Vancouver - Feb- User-centered design, innovation
• InHowse Designer - San Francisco - October- Work Practices, Corporate culture vs creativity
• How conference - Austin Texas - June - adobe products, corporate creativity
• SHIFT -Lisbon (Portugal) [MOVES] - October - User Experience, Accessability, Mobile, Future, Social Networks, Design, Digital media
• UX -San Francisco, CA , August -
• UX London - London - Summer

Javascript

• @mediaAjax - London - September - AJAX, Javascript, JQuery
• Web 2.0 Expo - Berlin, Germany - October - Mobile, Web Desktop, Web 2.0, AJAX, Social web, analytics, user/business flow,
• The AJAX Experience -Boston, MA, USA - September - AJAX, JQuery, Cross Browser coding

PHP

• Future of Web Apps - London - October - Community, Scalability, the future, mobile web, beyond google maps
• PHP NW - Manchester UK - November - PHP, Development,
  Best Practices
• IWTC - Dublin/Ireland - End of Feb/ Start of March - PHP, AJAX, CSS, Design
• International PHP 2008 Conference - Mainz, Germany (MOVES) -October - PHP, Reusability, Monitoring, Quality Assurance, Database, Security, Testing, Eclipse, Optimisation, Best Practices
• PHP London - London - End Feb- Testing, frameworks
• Irish PHP Conference - Ireland - Not yet decided
• PHP Works - Atlanta, USA - November - Caching, Best Practices, Code Auditing, Multilingual content, PHP 5.3, Development Process.
• PHP | TEK -Chicago (Moves) - May - PHP, Design Patterns, Best Practices, working with the latest Technologies, Testing, Security, Objects
• Zend Con -Santa Clara, California - September -PHP Best Practices, Unit Testing, Scalability, Performance

JAVA

• SpringOne America - Hollywood, Florida - December - Spring, Business applications, Integrating Spring with other technologies
• Core Spring Training -London - Spring, Enterpise Application Developement
• Irish Java Technology - Dublin - November - Java development
• Java Community Conference - Antwerp - December - Java Development
• Spring One – Spring Framework -Antwerp (moves) - April - SPRING, Java, Development
• The Server Side Java Symposium - Prague (Moves) - June - Java

Systems

• MySQL Users Conference & Expo -Santa Clara, California, USA - April - MySQL
  Development
  LAMP
  Security
• OpenSQL Camp 2008 -Charlottesville, Virginia, USA - November - MYSQL, Replication
• MySQL European Customer Conferences 2008 - London, England - October - MySQL, Best Practices, Reliability, Scalability
• GUADEC -Varies - Canary Islands - July - Web enabled desktop, new technologies, open source
• Fosdem - Brussels, Belgium - February - LAMP Linux Free Software Programming
• LUG RADIO LIVE - Wolverhampton - July- Linux, Free Software, Open Source, Application
• Irish Open Source Technologies Conference (IOTC) - Dublin, Ireland -June - Open source, Linux, Networking, applications, Technology Companies in Ireland
• Apache Con – Collective Apache Projects Conference -Amsterdam - April - Apache webserver, Tomcat,
• UKUUG - Manchester - November -Packaging, linux application development, File systems, distributions
• Linux TAG - Germany - May -Quality control, distributions, new technologies
• Linux.conf.au - Hobart(Moves) Australia - January - Linux, Open Source, Programming
• SANS - London - December - SANS institute, Security

Other

• Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow -San Francisco, CA -September - Mobile Platforms, Opportunities
• Face Book Developers - Global -September - app making, marketing, What’s NEW?, tech queries, viral marketing, Legal
• Future of Mobile - London -November - Smart Phones, Platforms, Emerging markets, Android and Gears, Data trends, marketing
• Agile Business Conference - London - September - Agile Business, project management

I hope this helps someone! Also please write a comment about conferences, and professional development in your job!