An introduction to Eloquent – by Keith Pincombe
Tuesday 21st May 2013 @ 6pm

Click to register now

With the launch of Laravel 4 at the end of the month. Now is the perfect time to take a look at one of its biggest features, Eloquent. This talk will cover the basics of Eloquent demonstrating how to define relationships, pivots and scopes. We’ll also explore the schema builder and how use Eloquent in your own apps.

Keith Pincombe has been coding in PHP for the past 7 years, a @phpne regular, and big fan of APIs, Composer and Beanstalkd.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register on our Eventbrite page by clicking the link below.

Click to register now

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at Newcastle Business Village – Clavering House (Location and Directions from Central Station to Clavering House).  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

The competition is simple, all we want you to do is tweet a pic using the hashtag #phppic. The picture can be humorous, creative, random or simply interesting. All we require is that it represents the PHP Community and/in the North East in some way.

The competition closes at the end of Sunday the 10^th of March and the winner will be announced shortly after. The prize is transferable so you can win the ticket on someone’s behalf.

Good Luck!

PHP: Extensions – by Harry Lawrence
Tuesday 19th February 2013 @ 6pm

Click to register now

PHP extensions are used frequently, many of which come bundled with PHP, others we download and configure manually.

In this talk I’ll be going through some of the pros and cons of PHP extensions, looking at various examples and seeing what it takes to build some simple PHP extensions that could potentially be used in some of your own projects.

Harry is a web developer working at Ground Six, mainly on PHP related projects but has a keen interest in trying out different languages, and iOS development.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register on our Eventbrite page by clicking the link below.

Click to register now

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

PHP: Handle with Care by Phill Brown
Tuesday 15th January 2013 @ 6pm

Click to register now

We all have a PHP handler somewhere in our stack, but it’s often a component that’s overlooked and misunderstood. This talk will cover the pros and cons of the four most common handlers used today – suPHP, DSO, CGI and FastCGI – touching on the performance and security of each one. I’ll also be exploring a new experimental approach to server setup that combines the benefits from each handler.

Phill Brown is a platform-agnostic WordPress and Drupal specialist who has an unhealthy obsession with making things more efficient

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register on our Eventbrite page by clicking the link below.

Click to register now

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

Lightning Talks by the @phpne community
Tuesday 18th December 2012 @ 6pm

Click to register now

Andrew Taylor – Nginx Crazy Caching
Anthony Sterling – Silex, An Introduction
Michael Peacock – Powerful and flexible templates with Twig
Matt Kirwan – The good, the bad and the ugly of working from home
David King – “Don’t Test, Profit”
We may still have room for another talk, tba.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register on our Eventbrite page by clicking the link below.

Click to register now

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

Click to register now

Beanstalkd is a lightweight and easy to use job queue. In this overview we will look at the features of Beanstalkd and how we can use it to run time-consuming tasks asynchronously. We will also briefly look at the PHP client library for Beanstalkd, Pheanstalk. We’ll
finally tie it altogether in some use cases with Supervisord, the process management daemon.

After this talk you should understand the benefits of off-loading your tasks using a basic queue and have a robust method of mplementation that you’re comfortable using in your next project.

Andrew Taylor is a sys. admin with a passion for opensource. Comfortable working in traditional datacentres or orchestrating the cloud, Andrew is currently in a DevOps role with Sage UK. He loves to help developers get the most out of their infrastructure and avoid some of common pitfalls when designing systems for scale. Follow him on Twitter @ukandrewtaylor

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register on our Eventbrite page by clicking the link below.

Click to register now

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

We’ve been hosting, and organising, our monthly PHP North East User Group events for more than 2 years now, and we think it’s time the region got it’s very own PHP conference.

We will be holding our conference on the 19th March 2013 at, the spectacular, Tyneside Cinema, and we’d love you to be there.

In addition to an awesome venue we’ll have 10 speakers, 2 tracks, breakfast, lunch, refreshments, and some other goodies waiting for you for when you arrive; all for a mere £50 per attendee.

You’ll be happy to know ticket sales are now open too. Alternatively, whilst our new website is being built, you can keep updated with what’s going on by simply sending us your email address using the form below.

Using Composer to manage dependencies and distribute your code in style by Matt Kirwan.

Composer – a “dependency manager for PHP” is currently gaining a lot of traction within the PHP community. This introductory level talk will first take a look at what problems a tool like composer solves and how it is unique, a little bit of history and then it will then run through the ridiculously simple installation process, basic usage and finally demonstrate a real(ish) solution for managing your code efficiently.

Matt Kirwan is a developer with an unhealthy obsession for learning. Currently working and living in Teesside, Matt, like many other developers is beginning to realise the power of truly re-usable component or library based code – the discovery of composer was just one catalyst for this thinking. You can check out Matt’s website where he usually waffles about tech related topics and uploads the occasional picture. http://www.mattkirwan.com

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register by going to: http://phpne-composer-rss.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

Refactoring by Oli Wood (@coldclimate)

Oli started his career in Java and Oracle development, but is now a PHP dude mostly working in CodeIgniter. He started weddingtales.co.uk, and currently works for canddi.com.

Oli just spent the last 3 months working on on taking an existing piece of code, battering it into shape and getting it back out there. We’ve all done it, we’ll all have to do it, learn from the massive holes Oli fell into.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register by going to: http://phpnerefactoring.eventbrite.com

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

Apologies for the late notice, but we have had to cancel this month’s event as we do not have a suitable venue.  Anthony will contact Oli to discuss rescheduling his talk for a later date. We will update the website once we have more information.

Refactoring by Oli Wood (@coldclimate)

Oli started his career in Java and Oracle development, but is now a PHP dude mostly working in CodeIgniter. He started weddingtales.co.uk, and currently works for canddi.com.

Oli just spent the last 3 months working on on taking an existing piece of code, battering it into shape and getting it back out there. We’ve all done it, we’ll all have to do it, learn from the massive holes Oli fell into.

The event is free and open to all. If you would like to attend this event make sure you register by going to [LINK REMOVED]

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

After the talk, many of us will be heading over to The Town Wall pub opposive for a few refreshing beverages, please feel free to join us afterwards too!

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.