PHPWomen has launched a partnership program for open source projects that are committed to embracing diversity and providing a welcoming and friendly atmosphere for contributors. We work closely with project leaders to identify specific areas of need, and will actively encourage our members to participate by promoting those needs through various channels. In return, the project leaders will ensure that newcomers to their projects will be welcomed and their contributions appreciated. This includes fostering an open and friendly environment for all newcomers, not just females.

Basically the goals of the Partnership Program are as follows:

• Highlight open source projects that have an open, friendly and welcoming community surrounding them
• Actively encourage anyone that is considering contributing to a project to participate by giving them specific details and letting them know what’s out there
• Improve diversity in open source by focusing efforts on open communities and notifying our members of opportunities
• Provide assistance to open source projects that are desperately in need of volunteers

We are so proud to announce that we have many projects already signed up for our partnership program, several of which have fantastic Statements of Diversity clearly displayed on their websites. These are all projects that value respectful communities and can be considered a safe environment for contributors. In other words, as a newcomer to their community, you won’t be harassed by a bunch of jerks, and your contributions will be valued.

For a complete list of our Open Source Project Partners, or to learn more about how the PHPWomen Partnership Program works, you can visit our OS Partnership Page.  If you are interested in volunteering your time and energy in one of these fantastic projects, check out the OS Project Opportunity page. We will keep this page updated as often as possible, so we encourage you to visit it regularly.

And of course, if you are a Project Leader for an Open Source project, and you are interested in partnering with us, by all means contact me! We would love to tell our members all about your awesomeness. (elizabeth.at.naramore.dot.net.)

The PHP UK Conference is now in its fifth year and is bigger and better than ever. Friday’s event has 16 different hour-long talks covering a plethora of topics from some of the world’s best PHP speakers. It takes place at the modern Business Design Centre in London’s bustling Islington area, close to Kings Cross and Euston and just two minutes walk from Angel underground station.

PHPWomen is a community partner of the event and will have a stand in the exhibition hall amongst a variety of other exhibitors. We also have two of our members speaking at the conference; Juliette Folmer who will be giving her talk “Regex-fu” and Lorna Mitchell will be talking about “Best practices in web service design“.

Finally we are also pleased to be able to offer all our members a discount on the event registration price. Head over to http://www.phpconference.co.uk/registration/phpwomen to receive a £20 discount on the cost that covers the main conference, as well as including a buffet lunch and dessert, refreshments throughout the day, cloakroom facilities, access to discounted books from O’Reilly and Packt publishers, countless networking opportunities, and a raffle with over 50 prizes on offer.

As usual there are social events arranged for both the evenings before and straight after the event – the former being free to anyone to come along and the latter starting with a sponsored bar by Facebook.

We hope to see you there on Friday!

For much more information please browse the rest of the PHP UK Conference site.

Come rub elbows with technology’s finest, as we unite diverse skills and interests, recognized industry professionals, IT managers, authors, speakers, and the business community that we’re all a part of.

Business casual attire is required.

Space is limited – RSVP is mandatory

The party is on December 21 at 7pm. For location information and more details, please visit  http://www.bootup.io/holiday-party/.

The calendars are available to buy on Zazzle, and can be ordered in a selection of sizes (Zazzle have local domains around the world; check where to ship yours from). 10% of every purchase goes to PHPWomen to enable us to use those funds to support the group and our members next year. Our gracious thanks go to our friend and booth babe Derick Rethans, who photographed us so beautifully (despite our diva moments!) and created the calendar products for you to buy – Derick, you rock

So – go forth and purchase! Surely there’s someone in your life who needs this calendar! Or maybe you’d like one for yourself …?

We have two places where you can buy your PHPWomen shirt:

US/Canada: http://phpwomen.spreadshirt.com

Europe: http://phpwomen.spreadshirt.net

For everyone else, you’ll likely have to see which shop can give you the best rate on shipping.

The shops are operated separately, so you’ll see a difference in the products we’re offering in each. We’ll be expanding our offering in the next few months, though, so keep an eye on us.

If you have any questions or comments about the shirts, by all means, let me know at elizabeth-at-naramore-dot-net.

This is the 3rd PHP conference I been to within a year; that is quite a lot for me! First the PHP conference in Apeldoorn by Eduvision, then PHP UK 2009 in London. Thanks to PHPwomen I could attend the most recent one: DPC09 by Ibuildings in Amsterdam.

Being in London for only 4 months and working at Touchnote seems short but it was nice to be back in Holland for a few days. I do miss Holland a bit and all the things I can’t get my hands on in London like: Hollandse drop (Dutch Liquorice candy), Hollandse nieuwe (Salted herring), frikandel speciaal and a broodje kroket. 7 more months to go and I will be able to have all of that again! and then it is my turn to miss the wonderful things in London

The PHP conference added more sweetness to my short stay in Holland. PHP or web related conferences are mental energy boosters for me. It is very motivating to absorb the new or more in depth information and to learn more and more. I seem not to be able to get enough of it.

But, what to do if there are multiple tracks with interesting talks at the same time?…panic? I didn’t know what to do. With agony I had to sacrifice the one for the other. How do you deal with multiple talks at the same time that you both don’t want to miss?

Here is a recap of a few talks that I attended and found interesting.

An intermediate talk about Caching for Performance
by Rob Allen

Do not try to get data more than once. First measure performance, how fast/slow your website is, using software like Siege. Do not guess what is slowing down your site, instead use a profiler to find out what is going on, for example: xdebug and Webgrind (http://code.google.com/p/webgrind/): What you’ll be looking for is:

• unexpected function calls
• functions called too often
• functions take too long to return result

Types of caching in order, from fast to fastest are database, filesystem or memory (i.e. memcached, Zend_Cache). Examples of when to use caching:

• names of countries doesn’t change often (if at all), use a cached version.
• a news page, update cache when a new article is added

Another way is browser level caching. This is not forcible but it is possible to provide the hint and ask browser to cache it. Get browser to cache files that are called constantly like css, js and images that are on every page. This is ideal if visitor visits many of our pages.

State & Ajax – How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World
by Paul Reinheimer

• The ‘back’ button is not ours to take! Give back to the visitors.
• Ajax requests sent have no guarantee to come back in the same order. To solve this, queue the requests. It might be slower, but it is reliable.
• One reason why visitors abandon shopping cards is because they are frustrated by the shopping experience. They give up and try somewhere else. This is easy because of the low barrier: type in an other address in address-bar. To keep your visiting shopers focus on user experience.
• User experience is the new brand! “Websites that continuously provide excellent user experiences are more likely to be visited, re-visited, shared, and praised”. Provide an experience that works exactly like it should work. For the developer it sounds like a lot of extra work. But that is 10% more work for me for 30% less effort for every user who will every use the site.

Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications
by Eli White

• Performance = speed or rendering
• Scaling = web app that works with current and future load of new level of traffic
• Don’t write code that is meant for 1 server only.
• Use Master/Slave replication. This way you have a backup if 1 machine dies
• Isolate load on the server is a crucial aspect of scaling. CUD on master and R from the slave
• Avoid slave lag! Especially with lots of traffic and CRUDS at once.
• Partitioning: Break database in smaller ones.
• Vertical, horizontal or application level partitioning
• Cache small pieces of data that can be reused often, eg: friends stories

The conference was well organized with over 300 attendees. Not only were most talks of great interest to me but the breaks, the lunch and the atmosphere was great. The times in between talks everyone seemed to be networking and meeting new interesting people. I too met interesting new people who you see around on the internet! It was also great to see the guys and girls again who I met before at PHP chatrooms on Freenode and other conferences/events.I also had the chance to promote Touchnote postcards. Giving everyone who attended DPC09 a free Touchnote postcard to send to anyone, anywhere they wanted! Thank you Cal Evans for the nice intro in the opening of the last day. I hope everyone sent a Touchnote card to their friends or family. If not: Do it! (you have the code)..

A pat on the back for the Ibuildings’s organizing team and sponsors. I hope to see you next year with more in depth topics.

Thanks Kana!  Were you at the event?  Got something to share about your experience?  Add a comment!

Happy Tweeting!

From this situation was born the idea of StixCamp – a BarCamp held in a rural area. The very first StixCamp was held in Newstead, Central Victoria, Australia on 14th-15th March and saw a number of seasoned presenters share their areas of expertise with the nearly 50 attendees.  The presentations included;

• Donna Benjamin demonstrating the open source vector graphics program, Inkscape
• Maxim Shklyar demonstrating XIML, a markup language for multimedia
• Dave Hall discussing how to approach internet access in rural areas – broadband in the bush

The post event survey indicated that StixCampNewstead was a roaring success, in no small part due to the generous support of sponsors, in particular Multimedia Victoria.