The 31st is sneaking up on us, and just like the year, the call for papers for php|tek’s 2012 edition is rapidly coming to a close.

If you haven’t submitted your proposals yet, now is a great time to do so (you know, before the new-year celebrations kick in, and you get distracted by more… urgent fun). Don’t forget, you don’t need to be a professional speaker to present at tek—all you need is a great idea and an infective passion that will rub off on your fellow attendees. Some of the best speakers we’ve ever hosted were first timers—and we love to invite new people to speak every year!

Well, what are you waiting for? Head on over to our CfP page, where you can find out more about the proposal process, and submit several of your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

FRIDAY’S SPECIAL: 50% OFF ALL TRAINING 

As the week winds to an end and the festivities inch closer, our final promo gives you access to our wonderful online training classes for half price. This means that you can take a full 19-hour course, analogous to (but much better than) three days in a real classroom, for as little as $250!

Don’t wait—grab your seat before they’re all gone. The promo runs until 12AM EST on Monday, December 26th.

The Mag Is Back!

Did you miss the premium subscription + full back issue catalogue promo that we ran on Monday? No problem—we’ve brought it back for one more day. Make sure to take advantage of it—at the end of the Friday (EST), it’ll be gone for good!

One more thing…

I’ve been told that there might be one more surprise in store for next week—this one, though, will only be available to those who are on our mailing list (if you’ve bought anything this week, you should be on it automagically; if you’re not, you can always sign up).

I can’t say what the surprise is… but I’m sure it will be a good one.

Until next year, from all of us at php|architect, happy holidays to you and your families, wherever you are and wherever your travels may take you.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it’s different than most of the other options out there.

Download the mp3 here

Supporting links:

• phpcloud.com
• Zend Technologies
• ZendCon

Disclosure:  I – personally and via Blue Parabola – have a long relationship with Zend. I attended ZendCon this year via a press pass they granted php|architect. Further, while Cal Evans is unavailable, I have served as (fake) Editor of DevZone a number of times. Further, before phpcloud was made public, we were granted preview access and gave feedback.

While it will still be a few days weeks until I’m finally recovered, I wanted to share a recap of CodeWorks East 2011 while it was still fresh. If you’re looking for the core presenters’ slides, attendees will receive them via email but they will not be published publicly until after the West Coast Tour is complete in January 2012.

First of all, I wanted to thank our sponsor, Adobe, who made the whole thing possible. They stepped in to sponsor both the East and West Coast tours. The interesting thing is that although they’ve been criticized pretty heavily for the Flash-and-everything-related-to-HTML5 battle, their presentations in each of the cities has been focused on tools such as jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, their general contributions to HTML5, and how they’re pushing the boundaries but still playing nice. I’ll save the surprise demos for those of you who will be on the West Coast Tour simply because I can’t do them justice in words.

We kicked off the tour in Madison, Wisconsin, as the guests of Madison PHP and our very own Elizabeth Tucker Long. As the first city, everyone was still tuning their timing and their jokes, but the sessions came together without a hitch. As a special treat, we had  Supreme Allied Commander Matthew Weier O’Phinney in to talk about the new MVC architecture of Zend Framework 2. While he covered the dispatch model and how Events are handled, he hinted at a number of other things in the pipeline.

The next stop was Cal Evans‘ stomping ground of Nashville where we began way too early for a Saturday morning. Luckily, the local Nashville PHP User Group turned out, so we weren’t all alone. I finally had the opportunity to meet Ryan Weaver, who serves as the documentation lead for the Symfony Framework. While he could have preached the benefits of Symfony over ZF, he put together a great session called “PHP Harmony” where he pulled together components of Symfony, ZF, and Lithium to build a single application. It was a great example to show how we can still have the “best of all worlds.” Also, due to some travel difficulties from our Adobe representative, I had the opportunity to give an hour long Twilio demo. We started with a simple Text to Speech voice and had phones ringing and texts texting throughout.

In Baltimore, we were back at Johns Hopkins University where we had my good friend and fellow trouble maker Eli White present on Scaling in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services. He touched on topics ranging from failover and stability to pricing and performance. Whether you’re an old pro at AWS or just getting started with it, you should check out his slides and make sure your conclusions still fit the facts behind the scenes. As we expected, the Baltimore PHP and DCPHP groups attended, and we were pleasantly surprised to have the leader of the Lehigh Valley PHP Group from north of Philadelphia as well.

In Raleigh, we found an unsuspecting children’s museum where Jason Austin could discuss “How Beer Made Me a Better Developer.” No, I’m not kidding. He talked in great detail how passion and the community changed the direction of his career and accelerated things beyond what he could expect… and it happened to revolve around BreweryDB. Once again, the local user group – Raleigh PHP – made a solid showing, but even more exciting was the birth of Wilmington PHP the following day.

Congrats.

Finally, we wrapped the East Coast effort in Orlando. Once again, we were in a children’s museum, but this time our guest speaker – David Rogers of Orlando PHP – covered the tools and concepts that fill his technology tool box. While many of them were PHP-specific, a number were general text, connectivity, and productivity tools. If you haven’t checked out his slides, check them out as soon as you can.

Also, I wanted to thank each of the happy hour hosts: Orchestra.io hosted the happy hours in Madison, Nashville, and Orlando, MojoLive hosted us at Brewers’ Art in Baltimore, and finally SugarCRM in Raleigh. Orchestra is a cloud hosting platform focused on PHP integrated directly with your source code repository. MojoLive is the [redacted] of [redacted], and we’re all looking forward to their beta launch on [redacted]. SugarCRM is the leading open source CRM system out there.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, time to put on your thinking caps and propose a talk or three to the php|tek ’12 Call for Papers.

As I write this post, I am sitting in the back of the room at one of the CodeWorks ’11 stops. I think back to all the friends – new and old – that I’ve talked to on this tour, and I begin to realize something important. While the PHP community is made up of a bunch of great developers, almost all of them work in more than just PHP. Many develop front-end code in JavaScript. Some work in mobile using Java or Objective-C. Some work with Ruby, Perl and Node.js in additional to PHP. Our professional lives are more complex than can be described by a single community. We are all still members of the PHP community, and I hope we all still identify ourselves as PHP developers, but we are all so much more.

That is what we are looking for at tek ’12; we want to know what you are working on and how you are integrating PHP and other technologies to build new things.

Of course, we are looking for good, solid PHP talks; there are always people who want to brush-up on the fundamentals. Integration, though, is what will catch our attention.

So put on your thinking caps and pull the strap tight. Look at what you’ve worked on in the past 12 months. What have you done to integrate PHP with other technologies? What have you learned that you want to share with others? What have you built that is cool? Answer these questions, and you are well on your way to a winning presentation.

A side note, a lot of people ask me “How can I improve my chances of getting a talk accepted?” I’ve written on this in the past “Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference” and all of those points are still valid. I would like to add one that we will call tek specific, because I don’t know about how other conferences feel. For tek, submit multiple talks. We try to get each speaker on-stage twice so we not only need a good idea form you, we need two. Some people submit as many as eight or nine, I don’t necessarily encourage that behavior but give us more than one.

I hope to see you at tek ’12!

=C=

Processing credit cards is hard. I mean really, really hard. For someone like me who manages his own server, writes his own code, and tries to keep all the balls in the air, the idea of maintaining a PCI-compliant server gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’ve looked at other systems and as much as I hate to say it, up until now, PayPal has been the best option for small sites like mine. However, for code monkeys, a new option is now available, Stripe.

Stripe bills themselves as “payments for developers”; so right away, you know they have identified a group – me – that needs a service – payment processing – and is targeting just that group. I love their single-minded focus. I also love companies that don’t take themselves too seriously, and if you take a look at their FAQ, you begin to realize that even though their service is dead serious, maybe they aren’t.

So when I started hacking together a simple script to sell my new book online, I decided to give Stripe a chance, assuming I would fall back to PayPal all too soon. Not so this time. Using nothing more than their tutorial, I was able to start processing test transactions in about 20 minutes; that was incredibly cool.

To get going, you have to set up an account. This involves the normal churn of email address, password, etc. However, then they add a twist; you have to complete a test transaction. You can do so in the browser or use the curl code they supply to do it from your server.

Once you are verified, you are ready to process all the test transactions you want. Getting to the point where you can process real transactions takes a bit more information, though.

It would be silly of me to publish code here since everything you need to process a test transaction can be found in their “Forms Tutorial”. Complete that, and you can fire off test transactions, play with their code and mold it into something that can work for you. Once you have the front end working, follow through to their “Payment Tutorial”, and they will show you how to finish the transaction in either PHP, Ruby or Python. Seriously, 20 minutes of copy ‘n paste, and you’ve got a working system that you can dissect to see how it works and how you can integrate it into your system.

The thing I like most about Stripe is that it keeps the credit card information off my server totally; thus eliminating the need for it to be PCI-compliant. They encrypt the credit card number in JavaScript and send it to their own PCI-compliant server via an Ajax call. What comes back to you is a token representing the transaction. You send that token to your server and complete the transaction. It is a beautiful system, and I am honestly surprised someone hasn’t done it before. Then again, the best ideas are like that.

The only downside I have found so far – and this may be a deal killer for some – is that they hold your money for 7 days before paying. Given the ease of implementation and the convenience that Stripe provides, this is a limitation I am willing to live with, at least for this project.

If you need to incorporate payment processing into your system or are building out something that needs payment processing, you need to at least consider Stripe. It’s not right for every project – no tool is. It is however, a solid tool that you need to be aware of for future projects.