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

Unless you work exclusively on one of the existing CMSes--and maybe even if you do--you've probably been tempted to build your own comprehensive CMS at one point or another. Before you give into temptation, let me tell you why you shouldn't...and then give you some tips I learned while building, maintaining, and abandoning an in-house CMS, because you'll likely give into temptation anyway. I'll cover the pros and cons of having your own CMS, and then, focusing on a typical MySQL-based medium-sized CMS, a few lessons I learned, including the dangers of coupling and inheritance, dos and don'ts of performance improvement, some stuff to avoid in database design, and a successful, simple way to deal with representing trees of content in databases. Let my pain be your gain.

What's included in the meeting?
Free Beer
e-book drawing for 1 lucky person
Networking
Fun!

Please RSVP @ http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/events/16720206/

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/

RSVP - http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/calendar/15722742/

This talk will be an overview of a lot of things that most people, companies, government agencies, etc. will need to make their websites accessible. By making your websites more accessible to people using assistive technologies like JAWS and Dragon Naturally Speaking you make it better for all and Google as well.

We plan on giving everyone an opportunity to make their websites more accessible by using the Section 508 guidelines and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0, along with code examples too.

We plan on covering the following topics:

• Valid and Semantic HTML and CSS
• Skip Navigation
• Text and Fonts
• Color and Contrast
• a:hover and a:focus
• “click here” and “remove”
• Headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
• Tables
• Forms
• Fieldset
• Legend
• Labels
• Search
• Screen Readers, Voice Recognition Software, etc.
• JAWS
• NVDA
• Dragon Naturally Speaking
• Miscellaneous Accessibility Issues

This class will have hands on work with code examples and demos to show the difference of how accessible code is for those using assistive technologies and how non accessible code is using JAWS, NVDA, etc.

Speakers will be
William Lawrence - @v
John F Croston III - @jfc3 @AccessibilityDC @AccessibilityCampDC

You can RSVP for this talk @ http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/calendar/15722742/

Free E-Book Raffle - Courtesy of O'Reilly Media!

Don't forget to bring some drinks!

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

The August meetup is just around the corner.

Remember that the date for this month is August 18th @ 7pm. You can find more details at http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/calendar/13958181/

This Month we have Andrew Nacin talking about WordPress 3.0

Talk Description:
It took less than six weeks after its release in June for WordPress 3.0 to reach 10 million downloads. What makes this platform so popular for users and developers alike? This talk will focus on how to leverage what 3.0 brought to the table -- powerful CMS capabilities in one hand, and blog networks in the other -- and a look at what's next for the increasingly powerful platform.

About the Speaker:
Andrew Nacin is an independent WordPress consultant in Washington, D.C., and since Feburary, a WordPress core developer and committer. He likes fast development cycles, prefers decisions over options, and blogs at http://andrewnacin.com

You can RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/DC-PHP/calendar/13958181/

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/