Richard McIntyre 
@mackstarHi, I have moved to the North of England after living in Japan for 15 years last year. I keep on coming back to PHP and have been through the motions of trying to find the grass greener on the other side. Getting my feet wet and sometimes doing a belly flop into the likes of Rails, Django, Java web frameworks, Cake, CI, Drupal, WordPress and others. I got inspired by the PHP community spirit whilst in Japan and love being a part of it. I am a committer to the Lithium project and have released quite a few plug-ins. I am also a part of the Union Of Rad LLC who I have done quite a bit of work for. I sport some very untamed dreadlocks but am not a Rastafarian. I am currently using PHP and JavaScript to power mobile applications at BBC Sport.
Lithium – the framework that contains the best of all worlds 
Frameworks tend to lean in either of 2 directions 1) Convention over configuration 2) Fully customizable but require large amount of architectural decisions After using a large amount of frameworks for both work and pleasure, finding Lithium which contains a healthy balance of default conventions but having true freedom to customize and configure your project both within the framework boundaries and by bending them makes this tool one of the most developer happy framework tools to use. This is why the phrase ‘Lithium the framework for people who hate frameworks has been coined’. Lithium is now being promoted and has just received sponsorship from Engine Yard (see: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/engine-yard-sponsors-the-lithium-framework/) and is likely to see more growth in the near future. The framework was born out the CakePHP project where the it build from scratch using lessons learnt from already building a full stack PHP framework. However making this well-rounded framework make PHP 5.3+ shine. Having been a committer to the framework having worked for Union Of Rad I will show you how flexible, fast and awesome Lithium is. I will show you practical examples how the conventions built in for speed of development can get you up and running quickly, but how also the freedom of customization can mean you can do things with the framework often not considered. If you need to refactor gradually your old legacy PHP website into a modern web framework incrementally then Lithium is definitely for you. If you need to start from scratch a new project and need a quick awesome cool tool then Lithium is also for you!
