2007 was a busy year, both personally and professionally. I won't go into the personal too much, because, well, it's personal, and some of the details are simply inappropriate for blogging material.

Here's the short version:

• One trip to Belgium and The Netherlands.
• Two trips to Israel.
• Two trips to Atlanta, GA (not counting the return trip from Europe, when I was stranded for a day due to storms in the Northeast).
• Three different user groups attended, with three presentations.
• One major Zend Framework release
• One PEAR release.
• One podcast.
• One webinar.
• One book published.
• One conference attended.

What follows is my month-by-month breakdown:

I'm pleased to announce that the Zend_View Enhanced and Zend_Layout components are now in the Zend Framework core. With these two components, you can now create some truly complex views for your application with relative ease.

The two components tackle several view related tasks:

• Layouts, or Two Step Views
• Partials (view fragment scripts with their own variable scope)
• Placeholders (store data and/or markup for later retrieval)
• Actions (dispatch a controller action)

I've been considering for a good six months trying to organize a PHP Users Group for the Burlington, VT, area. When we first moved to Vermont, I was surprised (and excited) by the number of PHP shops (which at the time I saw as job potential, as I was looking for work), and actually walked my resume around to a half-dozen or so. The area has a ton of PHP developers, and it only makes sense to have a UG where we can exchange tips and tricks of the trade.

Then, about six weeks ago, I mentioned this to my friend Rob. He did what I should have done all along, and googled for an existing group — and found one!

The Burlington, VT PHP Users Group has been around since November of 2005 on Google Groups, but we're having our inaugural meeting this coming Wednesday, 5 December 2007. I'll be speaking at this first meeting on Zend Framework's MVC components

If you're in the Burlington area this Wednesday, you should stop by. For more details, visit the event page, and don't forget to RSVP.

ZendCon '07 is finally over, the dust has settled, and I finally find myself with some time alone… practically the first I've had since Sunday. The week was fantastic, and I had many good conversations and brainstorming sessions. Oh, and I ended up giving three different sessions, so it's time for links to slides and materials:

• Best Practices of PHP Development. Sebastian, Mike, and I presented a full-day tutorial on PHP development best practices, focussing primarily on testing and testing strategies, but also covering coding standards, usage of SCM tools, and deployment. There were a ton of questions from the attendees, and Sebastian even whipped out some extra slides at the end showing new and little-known features of PHPUnit. Basically, reading the slides won't really indicate what we covered, but is more of a general outline. It was an honor and pleasure to work with Sebastian and Mike on this, and I hope we can do it again in the future some time.
• Zend Framework MVC Quick Start. This was basically the same session I did in my webinar a couple weeks ago, with a few corrections and a small demonstration. Cal put me on directly following Terry Chay, in the largest of the four session rooms — the one where all the keynotes occurred — talk about intimidating! Amazingly, the session was really well attended — others I talked to estimate between 100 and 150 people showed up. The most amazing part, though, was that when I asked how many people knew what 'MVC' was, I don't think there was a single person who didn't raise their hand — definitely a sign of how well accepted the pattern now is in PHP.
• AJAX-Enabling Your Zend Framework Controllers. I did this talk for the Unconference, mainly because its a topic I've been interested in and wanted to present. In it, I detailed how to ajax-enable an application through some easy tricks with Action and View Helpers and using JS to decorate your existing application. The reference app I used was a pastebin, and I've got code for both Dojo and Prototype flavors available:
  • Dojo pastebin
  • Prototype pastebin

The two highlight keynote speakers, for me, were definitely Joel Spolsky and Cory Doctorow. Neither spoke about PHP, but both spoke about topics that PHP developers should take to heart. Perhaps I'll elaborate on those in another post.

Another bonus for me was the number of old and new friends alike I got to see — I had many good conversations with Paul M. Jones, Nate Abele, Ivo Jansch, and Ralph Schindler, and opportunities to finally meet fellow co-author Lig Turmelle, Ben Ramsey, Chris Shifflet (dude, we've been to four conferences together, and never yet met!), and many, many others. I was also overwhelmed by the number of Zend Framework users who sought me out either to ask me questions or simply thank me and the others on the team for the project; I'm deeply honored that I can work on a project that affects so many developers.

And now for some down time to recuperate…

I don't know why I haven't blogged this sooner, but, yes, I'll be speaking once again at ZendCon:

I'll be presenting a number of times:

• On Monday, I join Sebastian Bergmann and Mike Naberezny in a full-day tutorial session on PHP Development Best Practices and Unit Testing. This expands on what Mike and I did last year, and will more heavily emphasize the role of testing in the development process — arguably the most important best practice you can adopt.
• On Tuesday monrning, I'll present a Zend Framework MVC Quick Start. This talk is based on a webinar I recently gave for Zend, and covers the various pieces of the MVC layer in Zend Framework.
• Tuesday evening, I'll present an Unconference session on Ajax-enabling your Zend Framework controllers. I don't know yet if I'll need the whole hour, but I can probably fill it up with some examples of decorating your apps with AJAX.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Last Wednesday, I presented a webinar for Zend entitled "MVC applications with Zend Framework". We had more than 50 attendees, most of whom stayed on the whole time. For those of you who attended, thanks for the great questions and comments.

If you would like to view the webinar, download the slides, or download the example code (a hello world app), visit the Zend.com Webinar page and look for the presentation; as of today, it's the first one on the list, but that will change as more webinars are presented.

This past Wednesday, Zend's Chief Marketing Officer, Mark de Visser, and myself joined the NYPHP group for a special event meeting. Mark presented information on Zend's development stack and toolset (which I entirely missed, as I was still in transit), and I came in to give an overview of Zend Framework.

There were some great questions, and nice discussions following the event. If you live in New York and do PHP for a living, and haven't attended, you should; if you're ever visiting the area, see if you can attend a meeting!

Here are the slides. They're done using S5, a browser-based slideshow system. Simply unzip and double-click on index.html to start viewing.