www.phug.ca

A bit of history
When PHUG initially launched back in 2006 we were a small group of Seneca College students and faculty. The idea was simple, let’s get together once a week after class and geek out. Originally we wanted to start a PHP user group in Toronto, but soon realized we could, and wanted to, do more. So began PHUG, an open source community whose focus was to bring students and professionals together through free workshops on all things open source.

Success soon followed. Our workshops went from 10 people a week to 70 in a few months! Membership on the on the blog went from 50 users to over 4000 in less than a year! PHUG became known in Toronto as one of the hottest open source meetups to attend.

We eventually began organizing large events like WordCamp Toronto 2009, where we doubled numbers from the previous year.

With all this success why did we stop? Unfortunately, like most open source communities and projects, we ran out of money and those involved in organizing events and meetups had less and less time to devote.

That’s the past.

New design, new features, and a new vision
I felt it was time to bring PHUG back from the dead. So I connected with some ex-phug’ers, colleagues, and community organizers to see how we could re-invent PHUG. This time around our focus is to bring you the most current information on all things open source from events, workshops, communities, projects, tutorials, and more on our new site. Based on years of user feedback and ton of great advice from seasoned community leaders we have decided to completely revamp the site into what you seen now.

We have decided to go with a forum instead of a blog, but not just any forum. We are using Vanilla Forums, a powerful and sexy open source technology that meets all our needs.

With a forum every PHUG member has a voice! Feel free to start discussion, share your thoughts, connect with other members. Post an event, a tutorial, useful links, and more.

Together we can build a strong community and a better PHUG!

So, let’s get PHUG’in!

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. These events are usually highlighted by speeches or keynotes by various people.

So What’s Makes WordCamp Toronto Different?

This year WCT will be exploring more than just a WordPress blog. This years philosophy is “GET Social”, there will be many presentations geared towards social media, community development, open source technologies, education, and more. The idea is show how all these concepts come together successfully on the Social Web.

What’s on the Menu?
There is  an all-star lineup and its growing everyday!

• Nick La - http://www.ndesign-studio.com, http://www.webdesignerwall.com, http://www.bestwebgallery.com
• Peter Flaschner – http://www.theblogstudio.com
• Erin Blaskie – http://www.bsetc.ca
• Jeremy Clarke – http://simianuprising.com
• Lorelle Van Fossen – http://lorelle.wordpress.com

…just to name a few. Check out the Speakers List

Also for the fist time this year there will be an award show, the WCT Awards .

WCT Awards

This year we’re trying something new! You can submit any work you have done with WordPress from plug-ins, themes, blog and site development, and more. Make sure to submit your work before April 1st and check out the current list of nominees.

and…

The Schedule

This year WCT will be 3 days of WP goodness broken down into three tracks of presentations daily! Also, everyday we will dedicate 2 slots to our Dev Camp and Get Social gatherings.

What’s Dev camp?
It’s an opportunity for developers to hang out in one room and code away. Build plug-in, a theme, or anything else creative with WordPress and we will open source at the end of the event. We will also enter the best Dev Camp creation into the WCT Award ceremony.

What’s Get Social?
It’s an opportunity for the WP’ers of the world to unite! We will dedicate an entire room for face to face social time where you can voice your opinion and get involved. Here you can discuss how you use WP creatively, what unique and interesting plug-ins and themes you’ve built or come across, and anything else that on your mind.

There are only 7 days left to purchase a ticket, so be quick before it is to late! - Register

Official Site: http://www.wordcamptoronto.com

…and yes, I said last night, normally we hold all FREE PHUG workshops on Tuesday nights, but Rick was unavailable so we changed the date to Monday,  which would account for the poor turnout ;(

However, those who did manage to remember and make their way out had the fortunate opportunity to learn about Railo and get some extra one on one time with the master.

Most of us, especially anyone involved in open source, doesn’t really know about or pay attention to CF. In fact, even those outside the open source community just assume it’s dead! Well, according to Rick and the many passionate CFer’s, the community is still here and growing! It’s always exciting to see another commercial project going open source. Hopefully, and from what I took in last night, Railo should attract many open sourcer’s to its realm. Open Source CFML offers tons of potential to the community at large, a few simple tags (which are basically HTML style with simple if statements) , you create on the fly pdf’s, out put and track video, embed AS and JQuery, and there is an Eclipse debugger as well, just to name a few.

Recently PHUG has recruited a few journalism students from Seneca to become bloggers and last they had the opportunity to sit down with Rick after the workshop and interview him on camera, they also recorded a good chunk of the workshop as well. The vudeo should be posted on PHUG soon, and i will make sure to cross post it here.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop > http://app.sliderocket.com/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=08F13F85-D0AE-2914-9E21-F7C7C94B2818

Some if you already know that I am a part-time teacher at Seneca College in various different new media programs. This semester I have been teaching a class in Design Fundamentals for the MFD (Media Fundamentals) program. In our last class the students had to create a logo design for 1 of 3 fictitious companies; sporting wear, cosmetic, and travel. They where giving roughly 3hours to complete this assignment using only Adobe Illustrator.

Just for fun, I made a last minute decision to run a contest for the best logo design.

We received almost 60 entries from 2 classes! Below are the finalists (Chosen by PHUG board members). The winner will receive a cash prize and books.

The vote is in your hands!

BackSpaceStudios presented “Open Source Design” – Exploring the world of Open Source Design, looking at what designers are doing with open source tools like gimp, inkscape, and blender3d. We also look at how designers get creative with interface design using various designer friendly open source languages like CSS, PHP, JS, and more.

We also had the opportunity to sit down with members of Mozilla, Linux, IBM, and other leaders from the Open Source Community to discuss how PHUG is making an impact online and offline. Everyone was really exited about our FREE Workshops, DEV Days, and WordCamp Toronto 2008. This will be a good year for PHUG!

We have uploaded our presentation here!

Some pics of our presentation:

I’m happy to report that our booth, Seneca and PHUG, was the most popular booth on the floor…probably ’cause we where giving away FREE chocolate ;0

Attendees where very excited to see the student papervision3D work on display, it’s no swimming dolphin, but the students did a great job considering they had only 7 days to produce a full pv3 interface with collision and interactivity, GOOD JOB!!!

- kapachka interface developed by Students in the Digital Media Arts program at Seneca College, Alex Nasser, Miaomiao Kuang, Dan Coltri, Robbie Luziuz Vanin, Ricardo Jazmines, Amanda Labatia.

Another popular student project at FITC was pv3world.com, developed by Geoff Palin, Digital Media Arts student at Seneca College, this project drew attendees daily. Geoff Palin has also accepted a position at BackSpaceStudios as a lead developer, we are very happy to have him on board!

Geoff Palin was also responsible for designing/developing the official Seneca@FITC blog http://www.phug.ca/fitc

Other highlights at the festival…

I had the opportunity to meet and geek out with the guy’s from papervision3D, paperworld3D, red5, Ribbit, and the one and only AS guru R Blank. I especially enjoyed discussing both PHUG and DMA student experimental pv3 work with Ralph Hauwert. I attended his Flash 2D and 3D effects presentation…all I can say is WOW! I also had the opportunity to sit down with Trevor Burton, the man behind paperworld3D. What an amazing individual, the man is an absolute genius! I’m hoping to contribute to the development of paperworld3D and eventually build some commercial apps with it…One of my favorite presentations was Ribbit. These guy’s have some of the coolest components I have seen in a long time. I am hoping to continue working with them on some PHUG and Seneca events as well as nominating some of my students for internships…I did not forget about R Blank…He gave an excellent presentation on AS3. BackSpaceStudios is happy to announce that we will be helping out with the re-build for the RMI site.

I will back post my blogs from the event under papervision, red5, and AS3.

This year at FITC Toronto 2008 members of PHUG will be presenting at the Seneca College table. Alongside with other Seneca projects, programs, and students, we will be exploring experiments in open source Flash. Our presentation will showcase the use of tools like Flash Develop, Papervision3D, and wiiFlash as both educational and professional.

We hope to follow this showcase up with a presentation at FlashInTO next month!

If you decide to go to the conference make sure to check out the official workshop on Papervision3D hosted by one of the core development team members, Ralph Hauwert.

Also make sure you attend the “3D in Flash: Now and in the future” session, which promises to become an interesting discussion between developers and Adobe!

Hope to see you all there…

Register for this FREE workshop
View Workshop Details
Read more about PHUG+RMI

Hope to see you all there!

RMI is also offering all PHUG members a 10% discount to be used for any of their Toronto listings! The promotional code is phug.

For more information on PHUG + RMI workshops: http://www.phug.ca/index.php/RMI