I’ve been at a number of community run, focused, and attended conferences so far this year. And despite our celebration of the results and benefits of a community, we often forget all the effort that goes into the mechanics and operations behind the scenes.

So you program in PHP. Are you active in a user group, forum, irc channel or any of the other of hundreds of ways that developers can get in touch with each other, share ideas or just talk shop? No? Come on in, I’ve got some things to share with you. (If the answer is yes, come on in anyhow, you mind find a new idea you like or something you want to share)

In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans looks at PHP, the community and how user groups fit into the mix. He shares opinions from the community and a video taken of a roundtable at this year’s TEKX.

As a part of the Please Start From The Beginning video series, Andrei Zmievski was interviewed about how he got into web development and PHP.

As Chris Shiflett mentions in a new post to his blog, this year’s PHP Advent series of articles has kicked off with the first article, Comprehensible Code by Paul Jones (of the Solar framework project.

Freelance author Esther Shindler is looking for help from the PHP community. She has a short survey that she is asking US and Canadian developers to fill out. Respondents that meet their profile may be asked for a phone interview. Here is your chance to help shape how people see the PHP community.

As you probably know by now, March 24th is Ada Lovelace day. Simply put: the day to put a little spotlight on the female tech colleague you admire most. Without the risk of looking like a suck-up, you can turn your whole blog into an ode to that someone special on your team. The idea is to write about only one person, but there we run into my main weak point: you have to pick your favorite. After thinking long and hard, I decided I just knew too many women who would deserve an ode. In this post, I’ll bend the rules a bit, and instead of one full post about one woman, I write a small section about every woman I know in the PHP community. Where known, I’ve added a link to their blogs, and if you google around a bit, I’m sure you can find a full ‘Ada’ post about each and every one of them. Since I can’t choose which I like most, I will instead order them alphabetically. This is definitely not a complete list, but just the ones that keep the highest profiles in the PHP Community

The new year has just started, and to start off well the dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) is organizing a frontend-oriented event. This event is intended for developers who get in touch with client-side technology. Not just PHP developers, also frontend developers, and everyone who has to deal with frontend stuff in some way. Whether you deal with frontends on a daily basis, or are curious to the possibilities of making a new application more attractive in a graphical sense, you can’t miss out on this day. Besides all this, it’s also an excellent opportunity to get a (free!) membership of phpGG!

There have been a number of PHP conferences in the last month or so, and conference reports have been slowly filtering in. First up, Jeremy Coates has a report on the PHP NW08 Conference, held in Manchester, UK, and he’s followed by trip reports and pictures from the PHP Conference Brasil 2008.

A number of users have also posted wrap-ups of the International PHP Conference 2008, held in Mainz, Germany. And let’s not forget Paris and Sydney…

Slides from the recently-concluded Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) 2008 in Sydney, Australia have started appearing online, and reveal that PHP received a fair amount of coverage. In case you weren’t able to make it, you can catch up on all the conference action with slides of talks on: Improving PHP Application Performance with APC by James McLean; Managing Hydrodynamic Models With PHP by Andrew Goodwin; PHP Frameworks in 2008 by Akash Mehta; Of Lambda Functions, Closures, and Traits by Sebastian Bergmann; and PHP on Windows 2008 by Microsoft’s Jorke Odolphi.