In short: it was a really great conference!!! For those who missed it, make sure you get your ticket for next year as the organization had done more than their best to combine great speakers with valued content, mixing serious business with awesome social events and had gone beyond any reach to give attendees, speakers, sponsors and staff of the venue a VIP feeling. Kudos to the organization as they pulled of the best tech-conference in years.

As a sponsor, we were very pleased to be part of this event and are already reserving budget for next year as we believe it’s the place to be at if you’re serious about PHP. The individual call-out of sponsors is a unique moment that we (and other sponsors) really appreciated.

Two days of PHP goodness, how can one even start to describe the atmosphere at the event. I think the post-conference video footage does a great job summarizing the event. See for yourself.

To the PHPBenelux crew, thank you to be a part of this experience! You guys ROCK!

In this talk I’m going to point out 11 pro tips that will make your deployment of web applications to production a smooth ride without stress, even when things end up not as expected.

Don’t miss this event as it’s the best place to stay updated on the industry, learn about new regulations and meet other professionals.

Already showing an impressive list of 4 tutorial speakers, and more speaker names to be announced in the coming weeks, makes this event already a “must attend” kind of event.

Looking back at previous years, the PHPBenelux team already has shown the world they can give a great conference and I know they will even surpass their achievements with their upcoming conference in 2012. That’s why in2it vof is proudly sponsoring this event.

So, block your agenda for January 27 and 28, 2012 and buy your tickets while they’re still cheap and hot!!! And for those of you who live on the other side of the Atlantic… push harder on your boss to have you come over. It’s well worth the investment!!!

And Cal wouldn’t be this great mind if he didn’t pick the right topics. This conference is all about project management, something Cal has been doing for a long, very long time (wonder if I was already born). But instead of sharing his own knowledge and wisdom on this topic, he has picked the best crew he could find in this universe: Brian Prince, Thursday Bram, Rob Allen, Keith Casey, Elizabeth Naramore and last but not least Paul M. Jones. That’s what I call wonderful management, just delegate it.

So project management. What is it all about? Can anyone become a project manager? What are the best tricks a project manager must know to be a good manager? All these and many more questions will be answered during this one day online event: “DayCamp4Developers, Invest a day in your career”.

Hang on, how much does this event cost? Well, it’s just US$ 40 (or € 28)! Can you believe this? And if you are with a bunch of people, it’s only US$ 100 (or € 69)!!! So if you can find 3 people, you’re already making a profit here on really low prices.

In order to keep these prices low for you to attend and to support Cal in getting these bright minds on board, in2it vof is happy to announce that we’re sponsoring this event as we see it a really good investment.

Wait no longer! Get yourself a really cheap ticket for a day of high quality contents and invest just a day in your career. It’s well worth the money and your time. Order Now!!!

“PHP Lint is probably the easiest way to validate your code on syntax errors, but it’s also the most overlooked feature of PHP on command line.”

In this article Michelangelo explains the usage of PHP Lint (php -l) and how you can easily set it up to validate code before you send it to your revision control system. He also includes an example of the pre-commit hook for Git and Subversion.

In the past 3 years quality assurance (QA) has become increasingly important to PHP developers and CI was considered a “must do” principle. But even today there’s still confusion on how to set things up and get started with automated QA processes.

That’s why I ended up with my presentation “Continuous QA” where I explain some of the most important QA tools PHP has to offer, how you integrate them in a phing build script to finally let Jenkins-ci take over the whole process.

I gave a presentation about unit testing Zend Framework applications and showed the audience how easy it is to start testing their code.

If you attended this meeting, please leave constructive feedback on Joind.in (http://joind.in/3381)

My slides are on slideshare, but you can also find them here below. If you have further questions regarding this talk or you would like to know more about unit testing your Zend Framework applications, contact me using our contact form.

The software allows police officers to detect speed violations, stolen or wanted vehicles, investigate forbidden traffic in designated parts of the city and more.

This project was produced for Belgacom/Telindus and they released a promotional video on YouTube regarding this product.

Note: This video is in Dutch

He explains with examples how to set up unit testing for your Zend Framework application and shows how you can test controllers, models and databases.

Definitely worth watching.

Luckily Zend Framework has something nifty called a view helper. With these view helpers, you can create simple classes that work with your Zend Framework view object while keeping your logic separate and maintainable.

<?php
class Application_View_Helper_GoogleAnalytics extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract
{
    public $view;

    public function setView(Zend_View_Interface $view)
    {
        $this->view = $view;
    }
    public function googleAnalytics($trackerCode = null)
    {
        $html = null;
        if (null !== $trackerCode) {
            $html = $this->view->inlineScript()->appendScript(<<<EOS
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
EOS
            );
            $html = $this->view->inlineScript()->appendScript(<<<EOS
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("{$trackerCode}");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
EOS
            );
        }
        return $html;
    }
}

Now that you’ve got your analytics code in a view helper, you can easily call it from your bootstrapper to initialize it with your tracker code.

But you’re not just interested in who’s visiting your site, right ? For instance, all external links should be tagged to know people are exiting your website and for which links. That’s why another view helper should be made to track external links. Here’s an example.

<?php
class Application_View_Helper_ExternalLink extends Zend_View_Helper_Abstract
{
    const CAMPAIGN_SOURCE = 'blogpost';
    const CAMPAIGN_MEDIUM = 'website';
    const CAMPAIGN_TERM = 'zend%20framework%20tutorial';
    const CAMPAIGN_CONTENT = 'text_link';
    const CAMPAIGN_NAME = 'communityworks';

    public $view;

    public function setView(Zend_View_Interface $view)
    {
        $this->view = $view;
    }
    public function externalLink($href, $text = null, $linkOnly = false)
    {
        if (is_array ($href)) {
            $params = $href;
        }
        if (is_string($href)) {
            $params = array ();
            $params['href'] = $href;
            if (null !== $text) {
                $params['text'] = $text;
            }
        }
        if (!is_array ($params)) {
            throw new Zend_View_Exception(
            	'ExternalLink view helper requires an array of params');
        }
        $params = new ArrayObject($params, ArrayObject::ARRAY_AS_PROPS);
        if (!isset ($params->href)) {
            throw new Zend_View_Exception(
            	'ExternalLink requires the \'href\' param to be set');
        }
        if (!isset ($params->text)) {
            $params->text = $params->href;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->title)) {
            $params->title = $params->text;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->rel)) {
            $params->rel = 'nofollow';
        }
        if (!isset ($params->utm_source)) {
            $params->utm_source = self::CAMPAIGN_SOURCE;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->utm_medium)) {
            $params->utm_medium = self::CAMPAIGN_MEDIUM;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->utm_term)) {
            $params->utm_term = self::CAMPAIGN_TERM;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->utm_content)) {
            $params->utm_content = self::CAMPAIGN_CONTENT;
        }
        if (!isset ($params->utm_name)) {
            $params->utm_name = self::CAMPAIGN_NAME;
        }
        $link = $params->href  . '?'
              . 'utm_source='  . $params->utm_source . '&'
              . 'utm_medium='  . $params->utm_medium . '&'
              . 'utm_term='    . $params->utm_term . '&'
              . 'utm_content=' . $params->utm_content . '&'
              . 'utm_name='    . $params->utm_name;
        if (true === $linkOnly) {
            return $link;
        }
        $qa = "_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Website', 'Link', '{$params->text}']);";
        return sprintf('<a href="%s" title="%s" onClick="%s" rel="%s">%s</a>',
            $link,
            $params->title,
            $qa,
            $params->rel,
            $params->text
        );
    }
}

And all you need to do now is open a view template that contains an outgoing link and you can immediately replace it with your new view helper.

Example:

<a href="http://in2it.be" title="in2it vof website">in2it vof website</a>

becomes in your view

<?php echo $this->externalLink('http://in2it.be', 'in2it vof website'); ?>

The generated HTML will contain the following

<a href="http://in2it.be/?utm_source=blogpost&utm_medium=website&utm_term=zend%20framework%20tutorial&utm_content=text_link&utm_name=communityworks" title="in2it vof website" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Website', 'Link', 'in2it vof website']);" rel="nofollow">in2it vof website</a>

That’s it. With only 2 view helpers you can generate detailed analysis of visits on your website.

For those who haven’t heard yet, this month Antwerp will be buzzing PHP for two full days! PHPBenelux, the PHP user group from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are organizing their second annual PHP conference on January 28 and 29 2011 in Antwerp, Belgium.

On Friday, January 28 they’ve scheduled 4 tutorial tracks in the morning followed by their conference talks. Besides a very impressive list of speakers, they’re also organizing a social bowling event.

If you haven’t done so, go get yourself a seat at the conference!

2010 will hit the history books as a revival of PHP with an increased demand for PHP and Zend Framework developers. Another booming technology is cloud computing and it’s not a surprise PHP is the right tool for this distributed platform.

In 2011 we believe these technologies will become better and easier to manage and In2it VOF will be on top of this new change of designing and deploying applications in a distributed world.