DragonBe's PHP blog

This year I was invited to speak at ZendCon 2010, the PHP conference of the year in Santa Clara, CA (USA). I'm giving three talks there and I host the uncon sessions (see my previous announcement about that).

I'm not only sharing the stage with great icons from the community, but I'm also celebrating the fact I recently became a ZCE for PHP 5.3.
At the end of ZendCon, I'll be a part of a community panel to answer questions regarding community and user groups. At PHPNW I closed the conference with a short but powerful community talk that inspired people to start a local user group in the area they live. I hope to inspire more people at ZendCon.

Overview of talks
Improving QA on PHP projects
Everyone talks about raising the bar on quality of code, but it's always hard to start implementing it when you have no clue where to start. With this talk I'm showing that there are many levels developers can improve themselves by using the right tools. Many tools are PHP base…

Today was a joyful day as I passed the Zend PHP 5.3 certification exam at Global Knowledge, a Pearson Vue exam center here in Mechelen. Since I announced this happy moment on Twitter, I got lots of congratulations from the community but also a lot of questions from PHP developers who were thinking about taking the exam.

Before starting the exam, I had to sign a non-disclosure contract with Zend Technologies, Inc. to keep the contents to myself, so don't ask me what questions were asked.

I can write a short article on how I prepared myself to pass the exam and what you can do to achieve the same successful outcome.

First of all, I was happy when Zend announced in it's ZCE newsletter (which I cannot link here yet) the brand new PHP 5.3 exam was available for purchase and I purchased a voucher immediately. Once I had the voucher, I could pick an exam center nearby and select an available date for the exam. Today was that date.

I had about a week to get prepared and a lot of job-…

Work has been crazy this year, with a lot of stuff going on professional and personal and in between this energetic chaos I totally forgot to mention I'm speaking at one of the best community driven conferences: PHP North West 2010 (sorry Jeremy).

But it's never to late to announce that I will be speaking about "Unit Testing with Zend Framework after version 1.8" and a community talk "Community works!".

Unit testing after Zend Framework 1.8
Now that I'm dealing with a ZF-1.7 project, I cannot emphasize how much I'm missing Zend_Application. So besides simple model testing we take it a step further into testing controllers, forms, helpers and doing some integration tests of databases and services. Clean examples show you exactly you can set up your system so it runs like a charm.

If you say you deliver quality, come and see my session so you can prove you deliver quality.

Community Works
Hey, we all have seen, heard and loved Lorna Jane's legendary tal…

When running a website for yourself or your company based on Zend Framework, you might want to show the Twitter messages to your audience.

Although the Zend Framework manual extensively describes how to set up a true Twitter application with the new OAuth implementation of Twitter using Zend_Service_Twitter and Zend_Oauth (since ZF-1.10.0), this is not what you're looking for. You need a simple approach, using the single user OAuth implementation of Twitter.

Registration at Twitter.
Register your "app" to twitter at http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new where you'll be presented a registration form for your app. Since it's not really an app, you should register your website as the app.
Once registered, you need to accept the general terms for usage of the Twitter API.


Once accepted, your applications registered and you can start implementing it. But for a single user approach, you need to retrieve your access tokens.
Fetching tweets
Now it's time to fetch those tweets and…