Let me tell a story about two random developers and how a vivid PHP user group was formed. My aim is to give pointers to anyone playing with the idea of starting a (PHP) user group by sharing our successes and failures and the many challenges we had to face along the way. –by Michelangelo van Dam

Day Camp 4 Developers is a new way for developers to learn. –by Cal Evans

There is a huge difference between a PHP developer and someone who “knows PHP.” If you are looking for a job, how do you set yourself apart from the crowd to get noticed as a qualified professional PHP developer? The answer is simple. You have to build your geek cred. –by Jason Austin

Before Sphinx, or Lucene, or a multitude of other full text searches came on the scene, there was MySQL FULLTEXT indexes. Less shiny, perhaps, but there’s still some fight left in it! –by Davey Shafik

Elgg is a popular all-in-one, learning, CMS platform that is designed for social interaction and sharing. However, being a relatively new player in the market, it has some undiscovered caveats that are usually only encountered during customization or heavy development. This article aims to equip an Elgg developer with the essential knowledge of some of the existing issues, including the notorious IOException error and to provide possible solutions, both proactive and reactive. –by Paul Bogdashkin

Communities are an interesting manifestation of human social skills, a truly incredible joining of people by a single motivation. In our case, the motivation is PHP – whether it is helping, learning, self-promotion, work or any other of a wide spectrum of roads which lead to getting in touch with this great force. Community leaders are an even more intriguing species; people who try to lead and organize this controlled chaos, and they don’t even get paid for it. –by Rafael Dohms

This month’s topic is conventions. We all have either been to them or at least heard of a few. If you are interested in Drupal, you are probably familiar with Drupal Convention, also referred to as DrupalCon. DrupalCon happens twice a year; once in the Western Hemisphere, and once in the Eastern Hemisphere. DrupalCon has no fixed home, and so far, has never revisited past DrupalCon sites – like Vancouver or San Fransisco – twice. –by Derek Webb

We at php|architect have long felt that there needs to be a way to recognize projects that have had an impact on the lives of PHP developers. –by php|architect

Why are clear text passwords so prevalent when securing them is so easy? –by Arne Blankerts

The Internet is the Great Anonymizer. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, there is no way of telling that “Cindy85” is really a 45-year-old Yorkshire man with a beard the size of a rhododendron bush, while “Rocco73” is a high-school girl from California who just turned 14. The Internet, like time and puberty, makes fools of us all. –by Marco Tabini

Learn more about substr() and strpos() –by Elizabeth Tucker Long

Collaboration is a powerful thing. –by Elizabeth Tucker Long