The conference was pretty small; about 80 people; in two small-ish conference rooms in the hotel. But everyone was great. Conferences are all about the people anyway. With the small crowd, it meant being able to spend time with a significant percentage of the people there. It was a mix of PHP thought leaders, everyday PHP programmers, and, since it was based in DC, a lot of folks focused on the unique industry that is DC - government.

He talks about some of the talks given - including Chris Shiflett's security talk and Eli White's look at high volume PHP & MySQL scaling techniques. He also mentions some of the "general chatter" that was happening around him. Check out the rest of the blog entry for more.

This past Thursday, I attended the DC PHP Conference. Since I was only there for a day, I'm sure I missed a lot, but I did manage to do some of the things on my list.

Talks hhe mentions were Mike Naberezny's look at Getting Started with the Zend Framework and Eli White's High Volume PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques talk. He also mentions meeting David Recordon from VeriSign and some work that Damien Seguy on tracking statistics on open phpinfo pages (about half still have register globals on!).

Registration is still open for the 2006 D.C. PHP Conference.

Great speakers: Rasmus Lerdorf (who got the PHP project off the ground in 1995), Chris Shiflett, Adam Trachtenberg, Laura Thomson, David Recordon, Elliot White III, Mike Naberezny, Will Fitch, Ben Ramsey, Tony Bibbs, Brian Ashe, Shen Guo and Bram Vogelaar.

Our L'Enfant Plaza Hotel venue is walking distance from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum and the new American Indian Museum.

To get the full details or to just sign up right away, head over to the main conference site and get all the details. Pricing starts at $695 USD ($400 for students) and includes two days jam packed with PHP goodness.

Wez will be speaking at both the php|works conference (presenting a 3 hour workshop on Extending PHP, a talk on PDO, and a best practices talk about sending mail with PHP) and the Zend/PHP Conference with his usual talk on PDO.

Adam will be speaking at both of those conferences and one more, the DC PHP Conference. At all three conferences he'll be presenting roughly the same material based around his Dude, Where's My Used Car eBay/Google Maps mashup.

Mike will be at the DC PHP Conference and the Zend/PHP Conference presenting three differnent talks - a look at PHP (Intranet) Web Services, another about getting started with the Zend Framework, and the last, a look at Best Practices in developing your PHP.

Wolfgang Drews comments that he'll be attending (and speaking) at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference on the subject of "WOOA - SOA for the Web"

Included in the list are well known speakers like:

• Adam Trachtenberg, the senior manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay.
• Laura Thomson, Director of Web Development at OmniTI, Inc.
• Chris Shiflett, author of the critically-acclaimed Essential PHP Security (O'Reilly)
• And Rasmus Lerdorf will be giving Friday's Keynote Address on "Getting Rich with PHP 5"

Keep checking back, too - more speakers will be added to the list as time goes by.