Joomla for PHP Developers (ditching com_content) by Anthony D Paul

We'll take a look at Joomla from the developer perspective, setting aside the typical configurer process and instead introduce the custom component structure, where to put your function libraries, a better theme format, core modifications for a better UX and more.

RSVP @ http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/events/23235481/

We are having a $bbq with our Friends!

Our meeting for June will take place on Tuesday June 14th from 5:30 - 8:30. Please make sure you RSVP ASAP - http://meetu.ps/1tqKc

Practical Unit Testing

Unit testing is an elusive subject: developers tend to agree on its importance but move right along without actually doing it. Many times their reasons are both valid and resolvable. This talk seeks to answer three basic questions:

* What is required for me to write effective unit tests?
* How can I sell my team on writing unit tests, even for legacy code?
* What strategies work for implementing unit testing in my organization?

This 90-minute talk will cover these areas and more. From the School of Hard Knocks will come useful information for practical unit testing in any development shop.

Speaker - Brandon Savage
Twitter - @brandonsavage
Website - www.brandonsavage.net

Meetup Details
Location: 1333 14th Street Northwest Washington, DC
When: Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 7:00 PM
RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/events/15978960/

This month we have Marco Ceppi who will be talking about source control systems.

Description:
Source Control and php Development: A brief comparative of Centralized
Source Control v. Distributed Source Control then a more in-depth look on how Distributed Source Control (Primarily Git) can play a vital role to not only a team/large project initiative but to individual developers/projects

Some Topics that will be covered;

• Philosophy of Source Control
• Why do I need source control
• Centralized Source Control (Ye Elders of the past)
• Distributed Source Control (Young warriors of the future)
• Git (Thundercats HO!)
• Why use Git?
• How Git works
• Basics
• Workflows
• Real world applications
• GitHub (Not just for Ruby people)
• Other Distributed Source Control tools

About the Speaker:
I'm Marco Ceppi, I'm 22, I work at Danya International, Inc as Senior Linux System Administrator and Lead Developer. I am also acting Source Control Manager (SCM) for all LAMP projects. I've been using Git for about two and half years now and prior to that I used SVN and regrettably CVS.

Giveaway:
This is what we have to give away thanks to Github! You can thank them on twitter @github

Next meetup is July 14th 7:00pm at Fathom Creative

This month Brandon Savage will present a talk on,

Micro Optimize This!
Every few months someone writes a blog post about the virtues of micro optimizing PHP applications. But does it really help? In this talk we focus on some of the more popular micro optimizations in the PHP world, and discuss some tried and true optimization techniques that really do improve processing time and user experience.

A little bit about Brandon
Brandon Savage is an experienced developer with nearly five years of PHP and MySQL development expertise. With a portfolio ranging from The Pickens Plan to Greenpeace, Brandon is experienced with high volume, high performance websites, performance tuning, and a variety of tricks and techniques for dealing with large databases and high user counts. Brandon resides in Washington, DC and owns Blueprint DC. He can be found blogging at http://www.brandonsavage.net/

You can RSVP and find more information about this event at http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/calendar/13763836/