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).

We decided in cooperation with the FrOSCon team to hold a subconference this year. This means we will have our own track with talks and maybe workshops. We want to encourage you to propose a talk for this event.

The subconference will be in St. Augustin, near Bonn on August 23rd and 24th. You can check out complete details on when and where to submit your talk idea on the official Call for Papers page on the FrOSCon site. Topics suggested include innovative PHP products, testing in development and integrating PHP with other technology.

Zend invites submissions to the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, ZendCon08, which will be held September 15-18 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP community and is the one time a year to mingle with the core developers, business leaders, and prominent members of the PHP community.

This year's conference program will include competitively selected presentations, tutorials, and invited speakers. All sessions undergo a peer review process by the ZendCon Content Review team.

There's a few different tracks this year including "The Basics of PHP", "Performance and Scalability", "Zend Framework" and several vendor presentations. You can find out more about the requirements and where to send your presentation on this page on the ZendCon 2008 website. The deadline for submissions is midnight on April 30th, 2008 so you better get busy preparing and sending it in!

Focus of the conference is a comprehensive range of talks about current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Furthermore, space will be provided for developers of free software and open source projects to organize their own developer meetings or even their own program.

This year will be the third annual FrOSCon and will be held near Bonn, Germany. Besides the main conference, there will also be a sub-conference that has a Call for Papers of its own.

This year's Italian phpDay 2008 that my pug (GrUSP.it) organizes in Rimini is coming at the end of May. This is the 5th edition of the event, and as usual it will be free for all. The main topic on this year will be the goPHP5 initiative, so there'll be a lot of talks on php5 only frameworks, migration, and other related topics.

Francesco and his fellow user group members will be hosting the even this coming May on the 23rd and 24th in Rimini, Italy. They've posted their Call for Papers to their wiki too. They're looking for papers around their PHP5 theme - migration between PHP4->PHP5, CMF and CMSes, Cross-platform/language programming, etc. You can also sign up to be a sponsor for the event too!

I just want to drop a quick reminder that the php|tek 2008 Call for Papers is about to close (on Oct. 31), so if you've been dragging your feet, now would be a good time to stop doing that and send in your proposals.

Some of the topics they're interested in this year are rich application development, PHP4->PHP5 migration and looks head at PHP6. Check out the Call for Papers page on the php|tek site for the full list of information you'll need to include along with the summary for your proposal.