We are excited to announce more details about the Uncon at tek13! This year we are honored to have Michelangelo van Dam (@DragonBe) serve as our Uncon chair. Michelangelo has done this for numerous other conferences in the past and we are deeply thankful to him for agreeing to help organize our Uncon as well.

This year's unconference will be an entire track happening all days of the conference instead of just later in the day on some days. If you're planning on attending the event and either didn't get a talk accepted or just want to talk about something you love, you should consider signing up when you arrive. Sessions for the next day will be selected at the end of each day from the ones added to the schedule.

Cal's three questions have to do with his user group and conference experience:

• You're a leader of the PHPBenelux User Group that moves around a lot, tell us some about how that works
• Tell us some about he PHPBelenux conference and some of the things you've learned about running an event like that
• Why should someone be part of the PHP community?

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

In this edition, I talked with Michelangelo van Dam a senior PHP/Zend Framework consultant. This man really needs no introduction; he is so much of an invaluable asset to the PHP community. As per wefollow.com, he is ranked as the 4th (out of 113) most influential person on Twitter for #zendframework and as the 25th (out of 2,543) most influential person for #php

Questions in the interview cover everything from a bit of history about Michelangelo out to how supportive the PHP community is:

Give and expect nothing in return. People appreciate it more when you give something from the heart instead of giving something as a favor for a future return.

Other questions touch on his "community animal" nickname, his community/life balance and his tracking of the work Microsoft is doing to help the PHP language.

In this series we will be releasing sessions from ZendCon 2010! This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2010 in Santa Clara, CA and features Michelangelo van Dam giving his talk: "Improving QA on PHP Projects"

His session looks at various technologies you can use to help improve the QA process for your code including phpDocumentor, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPDepend and PHPUnit. You can listen to the episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great episodes. You can also follow along with his slides over on SlideShare.

Zend Framework 1.8 has improved and simplified how you can test your applications, providing you with excellent techniques to streamline your quality assurance processes and reduce your maintenance costs.

You can listen to it on the page (with the in-page player) or you can download the mp3 to listen to it at your leisure. You can also see the slides from the presentation here.

Contrary to earlier reports, ZendCon's unconference -- a set of parallel, participant-driven sessions -- will be happening again this year, for the fourth year running. This year, Michelangelo van Dam has agreed to take the reins from Keith Casey and chair this year's UnCon event. Michelangelo is well-known in the PHP community, having helped found PHPBenelux, assisted in promoting and participating in PHP HackFests, and assisted in running the Dutch PHP Conference unconference offering.

The details are still being ironed out, so keep an eye on the Zend Developer Zone for the latest updates as the conference gets closer and closer.

From Michelangelo's post:

This past weekend, Belgium was buzzing PHP all the way. PHPBenelux organized the first annual international PHP conference in Belgium and it can be called a true success. [...] This was the first conference that I not only attended, but was actually involved behind the scenes. It was a great experience and I have now more respect to organizers of bigger conferences now that we know what kind of challenges they have to overcome.

And from Lorna Mitchell:

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. [...] The conference itself was very well organised and the venue worked very nicely. [...] The venue itself was just across the car park and had plenty of rooms with an open exhibition space which worked nicely - the two tracks were on opposite sides of this space so the footfall for the exhibitors was hopefully good! Full marks go to the crew.