Category Archives: php.ug

Moving php.ug to PHP7

The map of PHP-Usergroups on php.ug finally runs on PHP7!

But the transformation wasn’t as painless as I thought and would have expected. Therefore I want to share my experiences here.

First of all the provider that php.ug runs at already was compiling PHP7 when I thought about switching. That was cool and I can only recommend uberspace to anyone!

The first issue we encountered was the default path to the mysql-sock. By default it showed not to the actual socket-file so I had to alter the php.ini to point php to the right mysql-socket-file. That of course only applies for those that interact with mysql and do so on a socket and not via network. But that’s an issue for the hoster and they sorted it out fine after we found the issue together.

The second (and only other ) thing that caught me was the many new reserved words and libraries using those words (like String or Float) as class names. That had to cause havoc and I had to change some of the dependencies to use alpha-versions. Not really that good, but PHP7 isn’t finalized so I don’t see any way around it.

After those two issues where resolved (and some minor things I’ve created in my own dependencies) everything worked fine.

Thanks to everyone involved in creating PHP7 for an – after all – easy transition!

joind.in – a personal plea

Joind.in is a community driven project to give feedback to speakers at conferences and events.

And besides that it is a great ressource for all those that want to participate in the community. Not only as it’s an opensource project that everyone can help to make even better! But to provide feedback it also contains a list of almost every conference and event that is of any significance to the (PHP-)community.

And as the driving force underneath the hood of joind.in is a great API everyone interested can do a lot of cool things with the data no one has ever thought of.

To get the most out of joind.in (and therefore that API) some things should to be considered when creating or editing an event in joind.in. Some of these I’ll list here:

Continue reading joind.in – a personal plea

PHP.ug updated

Hi everyone.

Today I finally managed to update some of the features on PHP.ug I’ve had in mind for a long time already.

Now it’s possible to promote a new usergroup and to edit your own usergroup. To minimize spam and to know which of those some-hundred usergroups is your one you have to log in. Currently login is possible with your Twitter-Account (more might come) and then you are able to edit all the groups your twitter-account is associated with. That way php.ug does not need to maintain a user-base (and you do not need to remember another login) and you can pass on authority to the next usergroup-leader by passing on the usergroups-twitter account.

You can provide a simple iCalendar-File in your webspace and link to that from php.ug. That way everyone interested can integrate YOUR calendar into their Calendaring-Application and as soon as you change your calendar those are updated to everyone else. No need to maintain your event-date (and possible updates to that) on another page. In times to come we might even evaluate those calendaring-informations to an “All-Usergroups-Event-Calendar”.

And yes, I know that adding the geolocation currently is far from easy to handle. I’m working on that. Until a better solution you will need to provide Latitude-Longitude Informations. But with a recent update to google-maps you can right-click onto the location GoogleMaps, select “What’s here” and copy the string from the search-field. Paste that into the Location field and be happy.

If you find issues or have new ideas for php.ug feel free to tell us about it

Thanks to all support php.ug got during the last year! I appreciate that a lot.