The annual PHPNW conference gets better every year, and this year was no exception. I have been going to the PHPNW conference since their inception in 2008 and this year I was lucky enough to be involved in some of the pre-conference organising and helping out over the event.

Over the last few week (months even) myself and a team of amazing people from the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) have been working on putting together a DrupalCamp in the north west of UK. The culmination of this effort is DrupalCampNW2012, which will be 23rd-25th of November.

If you want to use Zend Framework in Drupal then most of the time you can use the Zend module. This takes a little configuration but will include the framework and instantiate the Zend_Loader_Autoloader class so that everything is ready to run.

The other day I was inspired by a story on Reddit about a guy who had created a Python script to automatically play the olympic hurdles Google Doodle. The Python script just passed the correct keyboard commands to the game so that the game was finished in 1.5 seconds, earning a gold medal.

Selenium is an application that allows automated testing of websites through a browser and consists of a number of different components. It allows the creation of browser tests that perform certain actions, which can then be run again at a later date. Three components are required to allow Selenium to run tests through PHP. These are as follows:

Although Drupal SimpleTest is an extremeley useful module it doesn't currently support data providers, which is a shame as I use that feature quite a bit in other testing frameworks. A data provider is a mechanism that allows you to call a single test case multiple times with different arguments so that you can ensure the correct output each time.