The PHP community has an active twitter presence. If you use twitter, come and join us. Here I've listed all of the community memeber's accounts that I have and that have given me permission to.

Scroll on down the list, see who you haven't already added and check out their Twitter page - then following is just a click away!

Based on feedback from the 'call for ideas' we have added a session on security. It will be presented by Johann-Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower. Also, we are happy to announce that Terry Chay, a well-known blogger in the PHP community and informally called the 'PHP terrorist', will deliver the closing keynote.

You can check out the rest of the presentations (5 tutorials and 12 sessions) on the conference's schedule page and, if you haven't already yet, you can still register to reserve your spot to enjoy this great event (talks only, tutorials are sold out).

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

Here are some resources to help you not only learn PHP, but also reference PHP information should you ever need it. This list isn't exhaustive, however, it should provide you with a lot of help when you need your PHP fix.

Some of the sites included in their list include:

• W3Schools PHP Tutorials
• Good PHP Tutorials
• PHPFreaks
• ONLamp

If you are new to PHP or are thinking of moving to PHP form other language then the following list of books will provide you with the required knowledge to become a seasoned PHP programmer. Of course, the list is subjective and you may have a different list of books in mind.

Their list is made up of:

• Zend PHP5 Certification
• PHP in Action
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• PEAR
• PHP Cookbook
• SQL for MySQL Developers

• Elizabeth Smith (near Chicago)
• Pierre Joye (Munich)
• Sebastian Bergmann (Cologne)
• David Coallier (Ireland & various others)

Local organizers are still being assigned. Those considered must already committers at PHP.net and will be available to answer questions for their given areas. Ultimately, they will do the final commits of the resulting tests.

• Chris Shiflett
• Elizabeth Smith
• Lorna Mitchell
• Jon Gibbins
• Ben Ramsey
• Travis Swicegood

Check back as the day progresses for more sites added to the list! Are you participating? Let us know and we'll add you to the list!

Developing in PHP isn't a textbook science. There's skill to it, and that skill comes from experience. Now, you could try your hand at every single PHP development challenge out there, or you could learn from the experiences of others, widely published on the web in blogs and developer portals.

Included in the list are sites like php|architect's C7Y site, Planet PHP and the the Zend Developer Zone (oh yeah, PHPDeveloper.org made the list too!)

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.