Manage your databases

Creating and managing permissions on your database became as easy as clicking a button.

Manage your users

We also made it easy to manage users and assign advanced permissions to your users.

Manage your user permissions

You also can manage your users advanced permissions.

Easy access to admin tools

And for everything else you always have PHPMyAdmin.

The control panel application section:

The Zend Server is only visible in the Applications section of Servers running the Zend Server image or if you installed Zend Server manually. Order your VPS with the Zend Server pre-installed and get your app up and running in minutes.

Existing clients can also rebuild their VPS with a Zend Server image at any time [WARNING: This will delete all existing data on the server]. You can rebuild your server using the control panel.

What we are looking for:

- Knowledge of technologies
- Knowledge of PHP
- Solid written communications skills in English

Bonus points:

- Spanish or Portuguese
- Previous experience blogging technical tutorials
- Involvement in Open source community (PHP, Symfony) preferred
- Remote work is preferred (unless you are already based in Miami)
- Flexible work schedule available
- Part time available

Please submit your resume and salary requirements to jobs@servergrove.com

The event took place at the University of Minnesota Continuing Education Conference Center. There were four different rooms to place more than 200 attendees, mostly from Minnesota and neighboring states. The speakers came basically from USA, but some of us came from Europe

Keynote

The conference started with Joel Clermont, presenting his keynote. For an eternal learner like me, I found it really interesting, as I saw most of the errors I’ve made in the last few years while trying to learn new stuff. Joel introduced some useful techniques to improve our learning experience, like pair programming, keeping a positive attitude and setting time-boxed goals. According to Joel, your ability to learn is the most important skill in order to succeed.

My favorite talks

Having 4 tracks ensured we always found an interesting talk. The difficult part was having to miss so many great talks… :) If I had to choose only three, these would be:

• “Don’t be STUPID, Grasp SOLID”
  Anthony Ferrara is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met, and if you join this with passion and good speaking skills the result is fantastic. Anthony explained all the concepts using descriptive -and sometimes hilarious- images. He ended the talk with the “Principle of Good Enough”, good remainder after seeing so many best practices, which means that at the end of the day, a good finished job can be better than perfect but non-working solutions. [ slides ]
• “Beyond PHP : it’s not (just) about the code!”
  Wim Godden did one of these talks that are sometimes difficult to find in conferences: practical and with real life examples. Wim focused on that small things you change in your code that make a huge difference.
• “Enterprise PHP Architecture through Design Patterns and Modularization”
  Aaron Saray, author of “Professional PHP Design Patterns”, is a very talented speaker and talked about Data Models, Domain Logic Models, Mappers and Services. It was very interesting to know some of the basics of something we are so used to like Doctrine. [ slides ]

Our talks

The first day Pablo talked about “Symfony2 and MongoDB”, two of the main technologies used in our VPS control panel. He introduced MongoDB, Symfony2 and then explained how to integrate them together through an ODM. [ slides ]

The second day was my turn and I talked about “Symfony2 Internals”. If I am honest, I was a little bit scared as it was my first talk in English, but according to the reviews and ratings, people found it quite interesting! Symfony2 is not widely used in the US but there were lots of Drupal developers eager to learn about the Symfony2 components that will be used in Drupal 8, so I tried to accommodate my talk to their needs with a live-code demo. [ slides ]

Lightning talk

The conference closed with lots of gifts to attendees and the firm intention of the organizers to make MidwestPHP 2014. And when looked like it was going to end, Jeremy Mikola surprised all of us giving an awesome lightning talk about… lightnings! You can see the video here. Stop reading right now and go watch it!

Special thanks

We would like to thank Jonathan Sundquist, Mike Stowe and all the volunteers for their great job. Looked like it wasn’t the first conference at all! Hope to see you next year.

Of course they had to sneak in some hockey slides… a great talk by Anthony Ferrara: Don’t be STUPID, Grasp SOLID

Dave Stokes talking about MySQL replication.

Josh Broton talked about Responsive Design. The dude really knows this stuff!

We met some of our amazing clients like Robert Speer.

Joel Clermont, gave an inspiring keynote.

@mikegstowe nobody hugged us but we were not disappointed.

Our own Raul Fraile

Adam Culp travelled to get some cold weather. He should have worn a hat outside.

As always, we have updated our OS packages with these new versions. Here are instructions on how to use (or upgrade) our Ubuntu/Debian or CentOS PHP packages.

Zend Optimizer+

Just a few days ago, Zend released open source their ZendOptimizer+ opcode caching and optimization extension for PHP. We have created CentOS 6, Ubuntu 12, and Debian 6 packages for PHP 5.3 and 5.4.

Package names for Ubuntu & Debian:

- php53-zendoptimizerplus_7.0.0-1_amd64.deb
- php54-zendoptimizerplus_7.0.0-3_amd64.deb

Package names forCentOS:

- php53-ZendOptimizerPlus-7.0.0-1.x86_64.rpm
- php54-ZendOptimizerPlus-7.0.0-3.x86_64.rpm

We will update these packages as new versions come out. Please use this at your own risk!

The file manager gives you a GUI to browse files in your server. Like most file browsers it allows you to browse, upload and download files, but we also took the liberty of adding a few more things:

- Create new files or folders

- File preview

- A code editor with multi-language support (yay! color-coded PHP, HTML, JSON, and many more)

- Rename/copy/move

- Compress one or multiple files by selecting them for compression

- Uncompress files

- Change permissions/owner/group

- Add shortcuts to favorite files and directories

- Filter folder/file list

- File sorting by column

- And last, but not the least: Automatic security check of your Composer files with the SensioLabs Security Advisories Checker app.

- Plus a few other goodies you would expect from a file manager.

This project was masterfully crafted in Symfony and AngularJS by @raulfraille and @pgodel.

As always, we welcome demand feedback.

Pablo Godel and James Fuller in pre-conference mode. Getting all the bags ready. Amazing job! Thank you.

Badges anxiously waiting for their lanyards

Sunshine PHP’s tireless leader bringing more bags to the registration table as guests arrive.

Welcome to the Embassy Suite Hotel.

Evan Coury reviewing his slides for his talk. Come to think of it, lots happened in the hallway. It was a great way to meet people.

Rasmus raising the roof! Oh yeah he did.

New haircuts… and old ones.

It was a full house

With lots of animated discussions

Some people laid down the law. Here is @jwage getting an education.

Larry and Fabien, Drupal and Symfony.

Locals

Not Locals! PHPers from Colombia, Peru, and Argentina (sort of)!

There was some coding too.

But mostly we played games. This is @jmikola introducing the rules for PHP Jeopardy

Pablo took a break to see PHP Jeopardy. Please make sure he plays next time. It’s his secret desire.

Hecklers

We really need buttons for next year. This is the first round of contestants.

Guess who won?

Some things we never forget.

Kudos to Adam Culp for organizing an amazing conference.

@phpstorm sent in a funny video. People laughed. I think the video was about the PHPStorm crew in the snow Czech Republic, we were in Florida so it was funny. Wait, perhaps it was not meant to be funny. Oh well.

Many funny moments.

Cal, nobody would dare call you normal.

Laptop art.

This was an amazing talk by Keith Casey. We really liked it.

Wait, it was only two days? Awwwww……. see you in 2014!

We have updated our OS packages with these new versions. Here are instructions on how to use (or upgrade) our Ubuntu/Debian or CentOS PHP packages.

PHP 5.5.0alpha5

For those that like to live in the leading edge, or like to play with new features coming to PHP, we have created initial packages of PHP 5.5. To install it, just install php55 on your favorite distro (CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12 and Debian 6). We will update these packages as new versions come out. Please do not use this in production!

If you end up writing better code or learning something new because of us, we are doing something right. This is why we are super excited to announce our latest partnership with KnpUniversity offering the full “Starting in Symfony 2.1″ screencasts to our clients (new or existing).

If you are not yet our client and want to learn Symfony, this is a great opportunity to sign up. When you sign up you will get access to the following tutorials at KnpUniversity:

- Getting Started in Symfony2 (2.1)
- Starting in Symfony2 – Episode 2 (2.1)
- Starting in Symfony2 – Episode 3 (2.1)
- Starting in Symfony2 – Episode 4 (2.1)
& also check out “The Wonderful World of Composer Tutorial” and other PHP screencasts

If you are already a client and want to enhance you knowledge with these screencasts, just open a ticket.

This promotion will run for a limited time.

Nothing has changed with the existing support, it’s just that many clients, in particular some from bigger companies were requesting a more structured support outline. So here it is. You can sign up anytime by opening a ticket. Find out more here.