Already we are now round to the fourth PHP North-East community meeting, which this month is taking place in the Cinema Room in the basement of The Town Wall public house. The meeting is free and open to all - so feel free to come along and see what the group is all about. For more information about PHP North-East, feel free to join our Google Group and be sure to follow our Twitter account for the latest news. 

Anthony Sterling has once again been bullied into arranging for some chip butties for us, so there will be nibbles and networking with fellow PHP enthusiasts.

This month features a talk from Jon Park of happie.st, your social motivation network to explore, create and share in life's happiest experiences.

Making the Git Happier - Jon Park

Git is an immensely popular version control tool that aims to make risk cheaper. Rather than having to rely on multiple-undos or the autosave functionality of modern editors, Git allows you to control when and how you commit changes to your project; and all without messing up your well-organised file structures.

This talk will start by giving an overview of the basic use of Git to manage a PHP project, working as an individual or small team. It will look at the concept of branching to manage feature development and a tried-and-tested method of branching structure that we use ourselves at happiest.

The topics of the talk will include:

• Initialising your repository
• The small handful of commands you need in your day-to-day coding
• Branching and merging
• Using Dropbox as a central repository for you and your team
• Organising your branches for best effect

This will be a brief introduction to the methods we have successfully co-opted into our workflow at happiest and, if anything, will provide a great springboard to continue your learnings around this great little tool.