Is CSS a mystery to you? Do you find yourself editing your styles over and over just to get them to display correctly in IE and Firefox? Have you created a powerful application, and want it to look nice and clean? Do you want to take your knowledge of CSS and Design to the next level?

Last month Michael Bourque, Director Parametric Technology Inc. (PTC), showed us how to make a powerful impact on end users by applying style and design through the construct of CSS. For those who didn't make the April User Group, you can Listen Now!  Download slides:  mystery_of_css_and_design 710.37 Kb

The Drupal CMS (PHP, GPL) allows you to assemble powerful web sites instead of writing them from scratch. It supports custom inter-related data types, configurable views and summaries of all content, user-generated content, search, user accounts, roles, media handling, and much more. Thousands of contributed modules provide all kinds of functionality.Eventually, though, many sites need custom functionality. For those who didn't make the April User Group, you can Listen Now! to Barry Jaspan, Principal Engineer at Acquia, Inc. as he takes us on a deep dive. 

We've all heard about PHP in high volume applications like Yahoo, Facebook, and Wikipedia, etc. but how many of us really know what it's like to run "consumer grade" websites.  To answer that question, we asked Jack Steadman, Manager of Architectural Development at Smarter Travel Media to share his experiences running high volume PHP.  Smarter Travel Media LLC operates two high-traffic PHP sites, SmarterTravel.com and BookingBuddy.com, which together serve millions of page views per week. During his presentation, Jack discussed many of the design decisions that were made to maximize performance as traffic scales upward.

We had over 70 people attend Jack's session, if you weren't one of them you can Listen Now! (slides:  bostonphp20080507 152.91 Kb)