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×

You can add your group by submitting a pull request to the PHP× website repository. Please add your group to the groups.json file, and once approved, your group will automatically get synced to phpx.world.

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:

Make sure there isn't an existing group in your region
Get a phpx(…).com domain (use local airport code or something similar)
Set up a free Cloudflare account (or any other service that handles SSL for you) and set it to proxy to the IP address 167.99.10.168
Pull request your group to the groups.json with the following format:

"<<your domain>>": {
    "external": false, // always leave this
    "name": "PHP×<<your airport code/similar>>",
    "region": "<<short city or region name>>", // can be null if airport code is good enough
    "description": "<<short description>>",
    "timezone": "<<php-compatible timezone ID>>",
    "bsky_url": "https://bsky.app/profile/<<group profile>>" // can be null
},

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:

Free Mailcoach accounts for organizers
Listing on Laravel News

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.

skylerkatz/website