PHP×

PHP× is a small group of PHP and Laravel meetups around the world. We're a small group now, but hope to grow over the coming months!

As of right now, this page serves as a scratchpad for meetup organizers. If you would like to contribute to this document, pull requests are welcome. Not sure? Join the PHP× Discord first to discuss!

Adding a group to PHP×

There are two kinds of groups:

PHP× Groups

These are groups that are hosted on phpx.world and use the PHP× naming convention. To start a PHP× group, read our organizer guide.

External groups

You don't need to host your site on our platform. If you already have a successful meetup, we're happy to link to it. Just submit a PR to the groups.json file with the following format:

"<<your domain>>": {
    "external": true, // must be true
    "name": "PHP×<<local airport code or similar>>",
    "region": "<<short city or region name>>",
},

The PHP× site

This site is a basic multi-tenant Laravel app. As of November 13, 2024, the following features were loosely supported:

  • Creating groups
  • Creating and RSVPing to meetups
  • Connecting to individual Mailcoach instances to send group announcements
  • Connecting to a Bluesky account to post meetups (partially)

TODO

Next steps for the site:

  • Adding an admin UI (right now all admin is done via artisan commands)
  • Adding more per-group customizations (like theme/etc)
  • Improving the announcement integrations

Other ideas:

  • Allow for external sites to add an iCalendar feed that we can then merge with the PHP× feed for a central list of all events
  • Add latitude/longitude to events to visualize
  • How do we ensure that groups that never meet eventually disappear from the site
  • We should have a "placeholder" concept for groups that are considering forming (maybe subdomains)

If any of that sounds interesting, join the Discord! You're welcome to PR changes, but it's best to talk it thru with group organizers first.

Resources for Organizers

Another big goal is to make it easier to organize meetups! We'd like to gather resources so that each person isn't in it alone. Some ideas:

  • Guides on having your first meeting
  • Companies that are interested in sponsoring meetups
  • Tips on estimating how much food/drinks/etc you'll need
  • How to get speakers, and what kinds of meetings work well

Some things already in the works:

Hopefully this list will grow over the coming weeks. Keep an eye out.

What's Next

PHP× started with Joe Tannenbaum and PHP×NYC. Chris Morrell launched PHP×Philly soon after, but in mid-November 2024, PHP meetups really started to explode.

We're in the very early days of figuring out what this group can do!

Stay tuned.