Eli White has an interesting new post about the PHP community and the conferences/presentations associated with it. According to his commentary, it's being done wrong and not quite how other communities/companies do it.

The PHP 'conference circuit' if you will, is one that has grown up in a different manner than other conference circuits that I've been familiarized with in the past (Java, Adobe, 'Web', etc). In most of these other areas, the speakers are PAID to attend. [...] On the flip side, in the PHP conference circuit, every speaker there, in fact, is PAYING for the right to attend that conference and be a part of it.

He talks about the fact that speakers will have more than just the cost of the conference to worry about. In fact, sometimes they can all add up to more than the conference would have cost them normally.

In the end, my point is this. I feel that given the nature of all of these conferences. That the organizers and attendees need to understand the situation and treat the speakers not as a '˜professional speaker that they paid good money to see'. But as what they really are. Far more akin to an Open Source Developer, who is donating their time for the better good and education of the masses.

For those not able to attend this year's PHP London Conference, you might check out a summary post Lorna Mitchell has recently added to her blog about her time there.

This year I had the privilege of speaking at this event [...] my talk was entitled "Best Practices in Web Service Design" although perhaps "Things I Wish Web Service Creators Would Consider Before Writing Unclear and Unstable Useless And Frustrating Services" would have been a better title.

This year's PHP London Conference was held on Friday, February 26th in London and had talks on regular expressions, mobile application development, cloud computing and database optimization. Check out the Joind.in page for the event to see comments left by those that attended.

With the ConFoo conference quickly approaching, one of the key things to have up and working at 100% is the conference's website. Anna Filina, one of the organizers of the event, has posted about some of the processes they've gone through to make sure everything's ready.

Building a conference website as the conference was being organized is probably one of the biggest challenges I ever faced. It is also the project I'm the most proud of. I'd like to share that experience with you. By the way, the event is still in progress, so my work on the site is not done.

She talks about some of the decisions they've made so far including tossing out the code they'd had for previous sites and a list of ten priorities they wanted in the new version. These included the look and feel, features to handle the Call for Papers and selection process, monitoring tools and the ability to schedule the talks.

Following up on their Symfony Live conference just held in Paris last week, the Symfony blog has gathered together content from all around the web talking about the event and sharing some of the opinions from those who attended.

A conference such as Symfony Live always generates a lot of buzz. Especially when there are interesting announcements or rumours are made. This post will give you an overview of the community response to Symfony Live from various blogs and social networks.

There's plenty of content here - blog posts (in multiple languages), pictures on Flickr, a video on Vimeo and plenty of Twitter posts based on the "#sflive2010" hastag. The overall impression was great and it seemed like just about everyone in attendance (well, of those that posted about it) seemed to enjoy the event.

You can also read some of the Symfony blog's own recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 for more specifics of what happened each day.

If you've been wanting to attend this year's Dutch PHP Conference (June 10th through 12th) but don't think you could come up with the price for the tickets, you're in luck! Lorna Mitchell has posted about a new contest they're running to give away one ticket to the event allowing the winner access to the main conference days.

We've been busy putting everything in place for the event and our schedule is now available over at http://phpconference.nl/schedule. So now you've seen the schedule, you probably want to join us! [...] We have a ticket to give away which will grant access to the main conference days at the Dutch PHP Conference!

To put your name in for a chance to win the free pass, simply comment on this post on the Ibuildings techPortal with a valid email address attached and you'll be entered. The contest ends March 16th, so be sure to make your comment before then!

Lorna Mitchell, heading up this year's Dutch PHP Conference, has released the official schedule for the event happening June 10th through the 12th.

The wait is over! The Dutch PHP Conference schedule is now available. [We've even gotten] someone complaining that the schedule is too good and he can't see everything he wants to!

Topics range from writing extensions and designing for reusable code to technical debt and stress-free deployment

You can find out more about the conference on its site and you can save your space by registering here. You can get a full three day ticket for 500 Euro, a "tutorials only" pass for 300 Euro and a "conference only" pass for 200 Euro.

As mentioned in this new post by Alexander Veremyev to the Zend Developer Zone, the first Russian Zend Framework conference has been announced - ZFConf 2010.

I am happy to announce the 1st Russian Zend Framework Conference (ZFConf 2010) which will take place in Saint-Petersburg, Russia at the end of March. An initial list of topics has been decided and the conference is open for registration. I am glad to participate in the event along with other speakers, some of which are acknowledged specialists and have a wide experience in using Zend Framework. The official language of the conference is Russian.

Topics include Zend_Search_Lucene, message queues, internationalization and a look at what Zend Framework 2.0 has to offer.

You can get more details on the conference from their main website or find out more of the specifics of registering. (Note: as of the time of this post, most of their site hasn't been translated to English, save the topics list.)

In a recent post to his blog Stefan Koopmanschap talks about organizing a conference based on some of his experiences at this year's PHP Benelux Conference (2010) as an organizer.

It took us a bit longer than initially planned but by last summer, the plans started to take serious shape. We started working on a date, getting our CfP worked out, and contacted the first potential sponsors. We spread out the work over the nine people involved.

He walks you through every step of the way including how the Call for Papers went, coordination of attendees and speakers, and how all of the planning and preparation paid off when it came down to the actual time of the conference.

Man, what a blast. I have not regretted a single moment that I jumped into organizing this conference. And I'll do it again next year. Even worse, I'm doing it again before that, as I've also volunteered for helping in this year's SymfonyCamp. But it's going to be a blast. We'll be having fun. The stress is worth all of it and more.

If you didn't get a chance to make it to this year's PHP Benelux conference, you might want to check out this wrapup from Ben Waine about his experiences and the sessions he's enjoyed most.

I have finally arrived home after the PHP Benelux Conference in Antwerp. It was an excellent conference. There were some truly excellent sessions at the conference, good mix of technical presentations and more abstract sessions on emerging technologies and management.

Among his notable presentations were Fabien Potencier's "Dependency Injection in PHP 5.3", "The State of SOAP" from David Zulke and Ivo Jansch's "PHP & The Cloud". He also mentions the talk that Eric Ritchie whos presentation was done entirely remotely.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the organisers of the conference for the great job you did. The event ran very smoothly, the content was superb and the social was really memorable. I'll be watching twitter for the announcement of #phpbnl11, as this event was so popular I don't want to miss the next!

Those attending the PHP Benelux conference (coming up soon!) will be happy to know that Ibuildings will be sponsoring an evening social event.

The official conference social event is taking place right after the main conference, in the exhibition/lunch room of the conference. We are very grateful for Ibuildings to have stepped up to support us in organizing this conference, and especially also the social event! Thanks to them, everyone will be able to let off some steam when the conference is over. We'll have two hours of free drinks and some snacks for everyone who feels like hanging out.

There will also be a pre-conference social time at DeVagant. You can find out more about the conference here (and here). Unfortunately, the conference has already sold out, so there'll be no more tickets at this time.