With over 30 talks and 5 tutorials, php|works is a great opportunity to learn from the best experts in PHP world-and to meet and network with fellow PHP enthusiasts from every walk of life.

There's a special sister conference going on at the same time for those focused on the Python language - PyWorks. The events will be happening November 12th through the 14th with the Call for Papers starting July 25th. You can get more information (like location, travel info, etc) as the full sites are launched at phpworks.mtacon.com and pyworks.mtacon.com.

Many of our readers and conference attendees have been asking about php|works 2008 so they can block it off on their calendars and make other fall plans accordingly. This year, we will be returning to Atlanta, Georgia (USA), November 12-14, 2008.

Their Call for Papers for the conference will be coming out later on this week (the week of June 15th), so if you're looking for a venue to share your PHP knowledge, keep an eye out (and we'll announce it here too).

(from the ZDZ translation):

We are very proud that testing guru Sebastian Bergmann will be present at the meeting! Sebastian is the man behind Unit the test framework PHPUnit, and is seen as the authority in the field of tests and quality control in the PHP community.

The event will be happening on May 10th starting at about noon and going until around 4:30 in the afternoon. You can get more details from Stefan's blog entry including a link to register for the event.

The PHP Vikinger unconference will be held for the third year in Skien, Norway. Just like previous years it follows directly after eZ Systems conference which puts this year's PHP Vikinger on June 21st, the longest day of the year.

He also links to pictures from previous years (nice hat Rasmus!) and a report from an attendee of last year's event. Check out the event's site for more information.

I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas finally has a PHP User Group and our first meeting is...tomorrow. I am pretty excited as I know there is a fairly decent size PHP programmer community in LV, it just hasn't been organized yet.

Their meeting is later today (April 11th) at 4pm at PT's Pub east of I15 and south of 215. It's an "anything goes" sort of even so expect to come, socialize and meet up with lots of great developers from the area.

This announcement is the latest in a series of collaborations between Zend and Microsoft aimed at delivering high performance and reliability for PHP applications running on the Windows Server platform. Several of these enhancements have been contributed back to the PHP community.

As a part of the project, Microsoft has even put effort into ensuring that several of the popular PHP packages (like Mambo and WordPress) work right out of teh box with a Windows Server 2008 installation.

I'm proud to announce that we're organizing another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, with the help of the great people at Zend. It will be in Amsterdam on June 13 and 14 this year. Last year we organized it for the first time, and based on feedback from our visitors we have made several changes to this years event.

Changes include the expansion into two days, increased capacity and the primary language of the conference is English this year. They also included an interesting twist - allowing those attending (or potentially attending) the conference to submit their thoughts to the "Call for Ideas" they would like to see presented.

The main conference site has full details about everything you'd need to know including where and how to register to save your spot.

When we officially started on 5.2 in March of 2006, we had several goals. I think we achieved most of those. We also accomplished some unplanned things. Our hackathon (me and maurice slept about 8 hours in 4 days I think) at MySQL Conference 2007 helped a lot. Remember, you can help us get there again by donating to our fund.

Updates include a new template for the forum, new PAI layers and more hooks to call them, better MySQL support, improved bundled modules, a new announcement system and a new, restructured search functionality.

If out more about the release here and more about the Phorum software here.