UPHPU Meeting Thursday 7pm | phpFundamentals topic – Cookies & Sessions in PHP | mainTopic – PHP + Business | specialPresentation – Stackable.com

Our meeting will be on thursday, feb 18, 2010 at 7pm. Location and map below.

mainPresentation – Sales 101: The Basics – Daniel Crookston
An overview of a handful of simple sales techniques you can use to schedule more sales calls, win more contracts, and ultimately earn more money. The skills we’ll be focusing on include turning a cold call (whether incoming or outgoing) into an appointment, helping the people you meet with to feel comfortable giving you their business, and negotiating for a better price once they have agreed to purchase your services.

phpFundamentals presentation – Cookies & Sessions in PHP.
For this month’s beginners PHP presentation, the topic will be Cookies & Sessions in PHP. The purpose of Cookies and Sessions and where to implement them into your website. We’ll cover how to use them, as well as some common mistakes that new developers can make.
Presented by Justin Carmony

specialPresentation – Stackable.com
Xmission will be coming out to present to us on what stackable.com is and how it works for you. They will be answering your questions.

Dan Crookston – About the Main Presenter
Dan has been programming since he was very young, and programmed professionally for 7 years in PHP. He realized pretty quickly that sales was going to be a big part of being successful, so he took some sales classes and did a lot of studying.
Recently he took a full time sales position to get more experience in a sales-only environment and to have an opportunity to learn from people who sell full time. They should feel free to contact me. My email address is dcrookston@gmail.com.

Utah PHP Users Group
Meeting Thursday, Feb 18 at 7pm
12393 Gateway Park Place Suite 600
uphpu.org

After hours party at Applebees 8:45pm at Applebees in Draper

• mindjuju
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RTFM and Basic Linux Server Administration

For our January meeting, Justin Carmony will cover PHP fundamentals with a presentation on reading the fabulous manual. For a new person to PHP, reading the documentation can be a daunting task. Even worse when you have legions of other developers screaming the acronym “RTFM!” Hopefully we can shed some light on how to get the most out of PHP Documentation, how to search it, how to understand it, and how to get help if the documentation doesn’t answer your questions. Justin Carmony will be giving the presentation, and will leave time for questions. You’re not alone in learning PHP, let the Utah PHP Usergroup help you.

Justin Carmony has worked in web development professionally for the last
five years. With emphasis on PHP, .NET, and Web Services, he has worked on
projects ranging from simple websites to complex communications between
thousands of remote systems. He currently is working as an independent
contractor & private consultant. If you have any questions, comments, or
curiosities you can contact him (justin AT justincarmony DOT com) or read
about his latest endeavors at his blog.

Trevor Sharpe will then follow with Basic Linux Server Administration, covering the advanced topic. Many programmers are finding themselves needing to understand and administer linux servers. This presentation is focused on learning how to effectively use the server through scripts, etc. Q & A session on admining to follow.

Trevor Sharpe is a Systems Administrator for a company in SLC and is also a board member for Utah Open Source.

• wade
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Methods for Mockups: A Geek’s Guide to Design

For our November meeting, Velda Harper Christensen will present on fundamental concepts that won’t replace your designer, but will help bridge the gap between logic and aesthetics. Velda is a designer, blogger, mother, geek, and full-time student. As usually, after hours party to follow!

We are also running a tech book drive to assist those who are just starting to learn web programming! You and I both know you’re not using those HTML books anymore! bring them in and let somebody else benefit from something collecting dust on your shelf! Bring in what you can, HTML, JavaScript, etc, I promise it’ll go to good use.

• mindjuju
• 2 responses
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High Availability Figlet applications using Goto

For our October meeting, we’ll be having an open forum on general questions and a small presentation on High Availability Figlet applications using Goto.

• wade
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CSS live coding demonstration

For our September meeting, our founder, Wade Shearer will present on front-end web development, specifically focusing on markup, styles, and foundation architectural structures. The presentation will be a live coding demonstration developing a global site template using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. He will take an audience-submitted design and produce production-ready code and site assets as far as time and questions will allow. Attendees interested in submitting a design should come to the meeting prepared with a digital copy of artwork for a website or web application (layered Photoshop file preferably). The design used will be selected randomly from those in attendance. A basic understanding of web technology and coding is recommended.

Wade Shearer is a professional graphic artist, interaction designer, and software engineer. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University’s Visual Arts College and an active member of local communities advocating and supporting the arts, computing, and internet technologies. He is the founder and administrator of the Utah PHP Users Group, the Utah Apple Users Group, and the Utah Graphic Artists Forum. You can also find him publishing in the online journals North Temple and Utah Preppers.

Wade is an avid outdoorsman, gardner, and cyclist. He is currently employed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints where he works as a senior interaction designer and user advocate for custom web application development. Previous employment includes Senior Manager of Interactive Marketing and Operations at Omniture, Creative Director at Doba, and Interaction Designer at 3Form. He also consults for clients, offering services such as identity development, brand management, art direction, campaign and collateral design, environmental graphics, and interior design.

• mindjuju
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Effective caching with PHP + Memcache

For our August meeting, Justin Carmony presented on effective caching with PHP and memcache. Scaling your Database or other resources your website needs can be complicated. Why not reduce their load instead? That is where memcached can help. Developed by the creators of LiveJournal, memcached is a light weight application that does one thing extremely well: caching data in memory and retrieving it very fast.

Carmony has worked in web development professionally for the last five years. With emphasis on PHP, .NET, and Web Services, he has worked on projects ranging from simple websites to complex communications between thousands of remote systems. He currently is working as an independent contractor & private consultant. If you have any questions, comments, or curiosities you can contact him (justin AT justincarmony DOT com) or read about his latest endeavors at his blog.

View slides from the presentation

• wade
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PHP Fundamentals Presentation Posted

I have just posted the presentation from last nights UPHPU meeting at http://utahcon.com/presentations/php_fundamentals.odp

Thanks to everyone that came out last night, I really enjoyed the chance to hopefully impart some best practices on each of you. I know I learned a few things along the way too!

• utahcon
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Fundamentals of PHP

For our June meeting, Adam Barrett will present on fundamentals of programming in PHP. PHP is a fast and loose language with many features and options that sometimes are used inappropriately. This short presentation will focus on 40 Best Practices to optimize code, and prepare PHP developers for a faster and better tomorrow.

Adam Barrett has been developing in PHP for about 10 years. Working for such internet giants as Overstock.com, GrabTakeOut.com, and most recently SOSStaffing.com, Adam has developed a little of everything including blogs, large scale ecommerce sites, intranets, mass email management systems, and PDF generating invoicing systems.

• wade
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Security + PHP

I’m pleased to announce the May Meeting for this Thursday, Security + PHP.

It’ll cover some of the basics of web application security, such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF), SQL injection and some tips for their prevention and becoming more security conscious. There will be some demonstrations of all the topics with some suggested solutions. We’ll also see a demonstration of the simplistic Browser exploitation Framework (BeEF) project from bindshell.net , which presents an interesting take on potentials of XSS and XSRF within the browser.

A little about Eric:

I’ve been a programmer since I was age 12, back in the days of TI-83 graphing calculators and the lot. From there, I learned to develop through a combination of languages including Visual Basic, Delphi, and C/C++ with mostly security and personal firewall penetration testing applications that performed on the Windows platform. I learned substantially about the Windows API framework and developed most of my system level programming skillsets from this focus. I’m coming up on my senior year of my Bachelor’s degree program at Weber State University and work almost exclusively with web development technologies, such as PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, etc.

For the past year, I’ve worked at Code Greene, a web development company based in downtown Salt Lake City; I’ve worked on backend medium to large scale integration projects as well as custom PHP and CakePHP web frontends and sites, though my preferences are towards integration and API projects. While I know CakePHP best, I have looked at other PHP frameworks, such as Code Igniter and Zend Framework. In terms of my computer preferences, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming so a Linux distro, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu, with some quality hardware usually suits me well. I don’t like Windows much anymore, as in the past year I have migrated all but one of my home systems to Ubuntu and only have to use Windows minimally at the university. Honestly, either way works if I can get the job done without too many runarounds, and you know…button clicks.

Eric can be followed on twitter at xtrementl (Extreme-NTL).

• mindjuju
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SSL + Apache

This Thursday’s meeting is going to be presented on SSL + Apache. It will cover SSL basics, how SSL works, how to get an SSL certificate, how to create your own certificates. The difference between self signed and certificate authorities. Building your own certificate authority. How to configure Apache with an SSL certificate. And other general SSL tips and tricks.

Lonnie Olson aka. fungus is a long time Linux/BSD administrator with a love of programming, networking, and security. Infrequent postings can be found at http://lonnieolson.com/ or on twitter @fungus.

• mindjuju
• 2 responses
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