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An introduction to jQuery for those with no prior experience. It covered both the basic and more advanced css selectors, binding functions to events (such as onClick) and a basic overview of plugin development.

Not sure about something? And that something affects the detailed design, an architectural decision or choice of functionality? Does that feel like a problem or a part of the solution?

There is a strong tendency for humans to feel unsure about uncertainty, in two minds over ambiguity and a little wobbly with instability. Whether over technology choice, implementation options, requirements or schedule, uncertainty is normally seen as something you must either suppress or avoid. Of this many people appear, well,
certain. That you should embrace it and use it to influence schedule, identify risk and inform design is not immediately obvious. A lack of certainty offers the opportunity to highlight risk and reframe questions, making uncertainty part of the solution rather than necessarily a problem.

Associated slides available

The Joel Test is a series of 12 steps which, according to software guru Joel Spolsky, every team should follow in order to create successful code. The steps include things like using source control, having a bug database and using the best tools. This session takes a look at how relevant his steps are to PHP development today, and the tools available to help us achieve his recommendations. Well look at the packages available for the steps where software can help and discuss ways to implement process and political changes to facilitate some others finally well talk about which dont apply and invent some steps to replace them.

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A development environment is a pretty personal choice, but when youve got over twenty developers all working on the same codebase, you need to start deciding on some standards. You need to find the options that aid your productivity, rather than restrict you with unnecessary overhead. Plusnet has been running its business on PHP for over a decade now, and over that time weve used a mixture of home-grown tools and off-the-shelf solutions. Some of these have stuck, some have had teething troubles, and others just havent caught on at all. Well look at the choices weve made for the tools that support us throughout the development process, including version control, unit testing, debugging, quality metrics, bug tracking and, of course actually writing code. Alongside the obvious technical merits of choosing a particular tool there are other factors to consider such as licensing, community support, industry standards, performance, security and so on.

However, you cant just throw all these tools at your developers and hope that bullet-proof code comes out the other end. You need to look at how you can trial your new choice, prove that it works, and then integrate it into your development process and this needs to happen without just stopping your business at the same time. This might involve creating new processes to take advantage of the tools youve chosen, or alternatively you might be migrating from an existing tool to an improved option.

All of this is purely theory without someone to champion the cause, forcing a tool from the top-down is never as effective as having your developers wanting to adopt it themselves. You need some evangelists in your organisation who can play the role of salesman, mentor, and technical expert. Well use a few case studies to see the experiences our developers have been through in finding a tool they wanted to use, convincing the rest of us of its value, and then how they went about getting it adopted. Through this well pull together the theory and the practice to give you a solid plan for successfully incorporating a new tool into your development process.

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This talk will cover project management tips and tricks that will help get a website developed, approved and live. We will look at the documentation, meetings and processes required to deliver a successful website with an emphasis on ensuring that the PM effort matches the job in hand. We will also consider how to handle the clients change requests when they arrive.

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This session teaches you how to detect and debug PHP scripts with the free open source tool Xdebug, which is an extension to PHP. The first part will quickly show how to get started with Xdebug. The second part of the session will cover detecting problems in your scripts by showing how Xdebug provides debugging aides in the form of stack/function traces, dumps of variables, modified PHP functions. In the last part I will show the remote debugger capabilities of Xdebug, where you can: set breakpoints on functions, methods and file/line combinations; watch execution details such as stack frames, per-frame information; run PHP code to modify the current state of your script and evaluating error messages. On top of this you will also see how you can use Xdebugs profiler to find bottlenecks in your applications.

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Content management systems rarely live up to their promises. Theyre hard to use, limit creativity and stifle innovation. Decentralised editing leads to poor quality copy, duplication of content and pages which havent been looked at since HTML 3.2 was new. At the other end of the scale you face problems of overloaded web developers who dont understand what theyre publishing to the web, constantly fire-fighting with no time for new developments.

At Edge Hill University, weve tried to navigate the middle ground by deploying or developing tools appropriate for the sites we want to create. Using structured content management we can keep our sites fresh, pushing information out to places where its relevant.

The foundation of all our sites is the Symfony web framework. This session will look at how our development team has made the change from working with static pages, Dreamweaver templates and classic ASP to a modern PHP framework encouraging more agile development practices and focusing on delivering usable systems.

As a web applications developer turned management, Ill try to give both sides of the story.
For the coder!

• sell the benefits to the business to help persuade your boss
• develop yourself by learning from other peoples best practices
• create cool stuff quickly and easily

For the manager!

• get more out of your developers for the same level of resource
• make marketing central to your website
• develop your staff without the need for costly certification

I dont have all the answers, but Ive got opinions about almost everything!

Associated slides available

There is nothing more satisfying than seeing software you wrote go live and into production. Now imagine if that software was PHP and going live meant installations on millions of machines.

The PHP project is always looking for contributors within PEAR, PECL, Documentation, QA or the Core. This session will be an introduction in how to get involved and there are things that can be done regardless of skill set.