PHPNW is a user group meetup of PHP developers based in Manchester, with the aim of sharing experiences and improving knowledge of all things PHP (and other related technologies). The group meet the first Tuesday of the month for a 40 min or so talk on the speakers chosen topic. They held their first conference in 2008 and have had one each year since. Find out more on the conference About page.

So Why should you attend?
2010 was my first PHPNW conference and as I said in my post at the time it was a great experience, I met a lot of new people, and learnt a lot of new tips, tricks and tools to help my PHP development. I have used them to improve the way I do things both at work and at home on personal projects so it was well worth the money and I had a great time.

This year, the conference is going to be bigger and better, with a new venue, more speakers, a new track, increased sessions on the 2nd day, a pre-conference tutorial day, an unconference, the list goes on. Its going to be an amazing couple of days and I learnt so much last year and am expecting this year to be no different. There are some really interesting sessions going on, am stuck with a couple of talks on which one Im going to go to. The good news is, which ever I decide, all the sessions are filmed so I will get to see all of them anyway after the conference is over and my post conference drinks related headache has subsided.

I really do recommend you clear the 8th and 9th of October from your diary, buy your ticket and pop down to Manchester for a great couple of days. If you do attend, don’t forget to say hi, and mines a Carlsberg

Now, enough of my waffling, down to the important bit. You have just 1 day left to get your Early Bird Tickets, before the price increases a little (not too much) in the final days run up to the conference weekend.

You can find out more information on the PHPNW11 conference website or by following and tweeting to the @PHPNW Twitter account.

PHPNW have held two previous conferences but unfortunately due to other commitments I was unable to attend, which is why for this event I made the effort and made sure I was free to attend… and what a great decision that was!

I was a little unsure what to expect from the conference, but with three tracks to follow all with interesting subjects I knew it would be a good day. I wasn’t disappointed.

Rather than bore you with my thoughts, I’ll let you make your own mind up. I’ll list which talks I went to below but as PHPNW made the brilliant decision to film all their talks you can pop over to the schedule page on their website and watch them all yourself.

Conference Site: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/

The talks I went to were:

Keynote: Teach a Man to Fish: Coaching Development Teams – Lorna Mitchell
Track 1 @10:00

Geolocation and Maps with PHP – Derick Rethans
Track 2 @ 11:15

Debugging – Rules and Tools – Ian Barber
Track 1 @ 12:15

The Journey towards Continuous Integration – Sebastian Marek
Track 2 @ 14:00

Developing Easily Deployable PHP Applications – John Mertic
Track 1 @ 15:00

Database version control without pain – Harrie Verveer
Track 1 @ 16:15

Framework Shootout! – Marcus Deglos
Track 1 @ 17:15

There was also an informal second day, at the Museum of Science and Industry, which had some really good talks, some of which I think should have made it into the main event on the saturday.

All the talks I went to were really good, and I learnt a lot from them, and the bonus is I can re-watch the presentations on the PHPNW conference site, and catchup on the ones I missed

Looking forward to next year already, and if you didnt make it down, I highly recommend you do!

The problem

Plesk unhelpfully ignores the base url set in the php.ini file with its own settings, but these settings are not configurable from the control panel.

The Solution

Create a “vhost.conf” file for the domain – e.g “/var/www/vhosts/<your.domain.tld>/conf/”

Add the following to the file

<Directory /var/www/vhosts/<your.domain.tld>/httpdocs>
php_admin_value open_basedir none
</Directory>

Then you just need to rebuild the plesk config files and restart apache

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a
/sbin/service httpd restart

Job done

I just wanted to do a little shout out to any developers, to say that the early bird ticket deadline is fast approaching for this years PHPNW conference.

Tickets have been on sale for a while now at £58 (ex VAT) but this will go up on the 12th August to £75 so if your thinking of going, now’s the time to get your ticket.

For more information or to book your ticket goto http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/.

Update [5/8/10]:
FYI The early bird ticket closing date has been extended to Saturday 4th September.

On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day!  I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.

My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.

The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail  it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.

I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but  unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.

I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.

The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.

All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.