phpBeer Social Event Management System : Why

"You can't drink all day if you don't start in the morning."

A PhpBeer is a friendly meeting of PHP developers and enthusiasts. They are held in various phpbeer-friendly venues. It usually involves drinking beer (duh!) and solving many of the World's problems. Sometimes, some participants drink too much and have to be driven home (usually not too long after solving World peace). Sometimes, some are even sick. But more about that later in the photo album smile

. The first edition was in the summer of 2003 in Montréal, Canada.

Until now, phpbeers have been organized / coordinated through email & phone calls. This site is an experiment to possibly build a more efficient tool/method to organize PhpBeer events.

Inspiration:

Why not use the above services? Well, if we did, you wouldn't be reading this page, now would you? So if you are here, chances are that you are also looking for an alternative. What if we wanted to organize some meetings which are not public? While these hosted services are very nice, we want something we can tinker with. As the saying goes: "Show me the code".

There are plenty of nice PHP apps to manage calendars. However, they lack the community aspect of meetup/upcoming. So we are thinking about building a social event management system (in PHP external link

of course). The back-end will be the Open Source Tiki CMS/Groupware external link

. We'll look into connecting / reusing other apps & services where applicable, like Google Maps, EVDB, etc.

The danger is that this project will become yet-another-open-source-meetup.com-wannabe-project-which-failed. On the flip side, it could succeed. Wouldn't you want to tell your grandchildren that you participated to this at the very beginning?

How could this really spread?

multilingual & multi-city
open source & P2P. Local organizers should be able to either use phpbeer.com or start their own chapter. Ex.: http://berlin.phpbeer.com or phpbeerberlin.de
data should be shared via Open standards (RSS, www.microformats.org, etc)

Once our tool is sufficient to organize phpbeer events, who knows?, maybe we'll start work on a more powerful tool to organize conferences like http://conf.phpquebec.org/ external link

. This would include track & session scheduling external link

and ecommerce external link

2007-06-12 update:
Tiki 1.10.x is starting to have more & more of the missing ingredients to make this project fly. For example:
1- Calendar has been completely redesigned.
2- Google Maps in trackers external link

3- Tracker subscriptions external link

So people can register to an event.

(This site runs the stable Tiki 1.9.8). Once we upgrade, we'll test drive these new features.

2007-11-27 update:
Tiki 1.10.x is closer & closer. We'll be using OpenID as well

Efforts are moving over to:
http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Event_Management_System external link