Event date:

The third PHP North-East community meeting, taking place in the Cinema Room in the basement of The Town Wall public house. The meeting is free and open to all - so feel free to come along and see what the group is all about. For more information about PHP North-East, feel free to join our Google Group and be sure to follow our Twitter account for the latest news.

As well as friendly chat with fellow PHP enthusiasts and the hope for yet more nibbles courtesy of that nice chap, Anthony Sterling, this months event features the following talk:

An Introduction to Zend Framework - Jamie Hurst

Many PHP programmers have already started making use of the features and customisation abilities of model-view-controller frameworks. These frameworks easily allow code to be re-used by separating the business logic from the user interface, but they can be difficult to start using when you’re used to working in linear pages, especially at first. The Zend Framework is one such MVC framework, and offers a lot of fantastic features for use in PHP projects, such as view and content abstraction, loose database coupling with model objects, simple caching, security and the ability to customise and extend every aspect of the framework itself.

This talk will consist of a basic look at the steps needed to get up and running with Zend Framework, using the example of a blog containing posts and categories and will include:

  • Installing the framework
  • Setting up models and linking to a MySQL database
  • Displaying posts from the database in both a standard page and RSS feed
  • Creating a simple form for comments
  • Caching the posts to reduce database and server load

This is just a brief glimpse into the rich feature-set that Zend Framework offers, and will consist of a lot of code examples and demonstrations to have a go at.