We're really excited to announce that we are cooking up a really great Boston PHP event were calling the "Framework Bake off".

Volunteer members will take the podium for 30 minutes, and will be given a small but simple application to develop using a their PHP framework of choice. They will do all the development in real time, in front of a live audience. We will explore each of these frameworks and discuss the differences.

If your interested in choosing a framework, or want to learn more about the one your using - then this event is for you - you won't want to miss this one.

We will be exploring the following frameworks:

• CakePHP
  
• Symfony
  
• Zend Framework
  
• CodeIgnitor

To RSVP click here.

Thanks again to our good friends at Packt Publishing for their support.  We will raffle of two new Framework titles at the end of our meeting 

Barack Obama's presidential campaign was praised for being one of the most technically savvy ever. What most people don't realize, though, was a lot of that technology was powered by PHP and created right here in Boston at Blue State Digital.  This month we had the opportunity to listing to Josh King and Chuck Hagenbuch as they shared their experiences building and scaling some of the tools which powered my.barackobama.com and the millions of phone calls and billion emails that helped make history on January 20th, 2009.

The meeting drew about 50 people.  If you weren't one of them, or you would like to hear the presentation again, you can Listen Now! or click the "Read More" tag below to hear it through your browser.

Although Smarty is known as a "Template Engine", it would be more accurately described as a "Template/Presentation Framework." That is, it provides the programmer and template designer with a wealth of tools to automate tasks commonly dealt with at the presentation layer of an application. I stress the word Framework because Smarty is not a simple tag-replacing template engine. Although it can be used for such a simple purpose, its focus is on quick and painless development and deployment of your application, while maintaining high-performance, scalability, security and future growth.

Join BostonPHP and Michael Bourque as he takes you through the Smarty Framework. This will be an interactive session where Michael will write code and demonstrate throughout the session. You will leave with the tools and information to apply Smarty to your next project:

• What is Smarty? Learn why it is good to separate the presentation code from the business logic of your application
• Smarty syntax and functions
• Best practices and demos
• How to use a terminolgy property file to make it easier to control application terminology and software strings outside of your code.
• Learn how to offer multiple language support and switching in your application
• Plenty of time for your questions and answers

See why so many others love using Smarty in their projects. You will too and I will show you how. Invite your PHP firends, your CSS/Design team - you don't want to miss this one. To learn more click here .