We're back! And we are glad to announce that we'll be organising another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, which will be held in Amsterdam from 6th to 8th June 2013.

Submissions should be relevant to PHP developers, to help them to expand their skill set and improve their practices. In particular we'd like to receive proposals regarding emerging technologies, performance and scalability, platforms and best practices. The standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes and tutorials are 3 or 6 hours in length (note that 6 hours is our preference).

As always we're excited about all kinds of different topics. You could say that as long as it's somehow related to PHP and you're really excited about it, we want to hear it!

You can find out more about the conference in general from the main conference site.

fter three successful conferences earlier this year and last year, the PHPBenelux team is proud to announce the 4th edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. Like last year, the conference will last two full days, starting with a half day tutorial followed by 1.5 days of conference. The conference is on Friday 25th January and Saturday 26th January 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium. Become part of this year's speaker schedule at the PHPBenelux Conference 2013. Each chosen speaker receives a speaker package!

There's two types of sessions - the 60 minute regular sessions and 3 hour tutorials. Suggested topics include "Content Management Systems", "Frameworks", "Best Practices" and "HTML5". The Call for Papers is only open until October 1st so be sure to submit your ideas today!

The ConFoo team just opened its call for papers. Candidates can submit proposals until September 23. Consult the call for papers page for details and to start submitting. That page also explains what expenses ConFoo can cover for speakers. You can even get advice on how to write proposals. The call for papers is public, meaning that all proposals get published on the website for others to vote and comment on.

This year's event is happening from February 25th through March 1st in Montreal, Canada with tracks covering things like .NET development, Project Management, Web Standards, DevOps and, of course, PHP. The Call for Papers closes on September 23rd so you have less than a month to get your proposals in!

There has been a lot of traction lately on the topic of the PSR "PHP Framework Interoperability Group". They are introducing two new proposed standards: PSR-1and PSR-2, both dealing with code formatting standards. [...] I have read both, and actually agree and think they are quite good. However, there's a deeper problem. Open Standards is something that the internet was built upon. From HTTP, E-Mail and HTML to ECMA Script (JavaScript), OAuth and JSON, open standards are everywhere. The problem with the entire PSR process is that it is not designed to produce open standards.

He describes an "open standard" and points to this RFC as an example of the open process they should result from. He talks about the importance of the process and how having more people reviewing and contributing their ideas could help find issues in the proposal. He issues a "call to the PSR team" to adopt this practice, allowing a more open flow to the ideas that are being proposed.

Note that I'm not asking to open the vote to anyone else. I'm not saying that standards should be approved by everyone in the community. There should still be a standards body that makes the final decision. But they should make that decision based on community input. They should actively look for and encourage open discussion prior to voting.

Software that requires an enormous amount of changes to implement one new feature or fix a bug is unstable and should be considered as "bad". Software should be designed so, that in case of a new feature, no existing classes should have to change. In other words: it is closed for modification. Existing software may be extended to achieve new features however.

He starts off with a "What" section explaining a bit more about what this open/closed means for your code and gets into an example showing it in a more practical way. He shows how to take the principle and refactor an API connector class to pass in the object it needs (Bike) and use that to get information (rather than just passing in the data). He uses a Factory to get the object type he needs based on the Bike type.

Let's overcome some of these issues [with only being able to extend the invoker class and that the invoker needs to know how to create commands], and also make the code even more extensible. I'll use a simplified command invoker to demonstrate.

His code is included - the creation of a "Command" interface and two comments that implement it: "HelloCommand" and "PwdCommand", each with "register" and "execute" methods. His "Invoker" class then only needs to be told how to map these commands and the "register" is called as they're needed. You can find the full example code for this invocation example in this gist.

This article shows an example of how the application of the Open/Closed Principle improved the design of a real project, the open source library PHPUnit_Selenium. These design concepts apply to every object-oriented language, including Java, Ruby or even C++. The Open Closed Principle, part of SOLID set, states that software should be open for extension and at the same time closed for modification.

He starts with a little background on the project, pointing out that there's a Session object it uses for all of its testing with a magic "__call" method that handles any kind of method call to the object. This method has issues (dependencies, strict requirements for use) but can be refactored according to the Open/Closed idea to set up an array of anonymous functions that can be called as a "command". Examples of these types of classes are also included (one for the "click" action on a button and another for getting the current location).

Some of you may have already heard that the ConFoo call for papers is already open. The great thing about it this year, is that it's public. This means that anyone can vote on the proposals. Besides being fun for the speakers and attendees, it opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

She talks about some of the reasons they decided to go this route such as wanting to give the attendees the most "bang for the buck" and the ability for speakers to see what their fellow speakers are proposing and is working. The committee, of course, will have the final say, but the votes will help quite a bit.

If you'd like to vote and are even considering making it to this year's event, go over an sign up to vote on the conference's Call for Papers section.

The 7th Annual Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will take place October 17-20, 2011, In Santa Clara, California. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and brings together PHP developers and IT managers from around the world to discuss PHP best practices and explore new technologies.

The Early Bird pricing will last until September 10th saving you about $200 USD off the price of the ticket. The full ZendCon experience (Tutorials & Conference) is $1,195 USD or you can opt for just the Tutorial for $445 USD or just the Conference for $945 USD. You're in luck if you're looking for discounts, though - they have lots o them including ones for ZendCon alumni, group discounts, ZCEs and students.

The schedule's not quite out yet, but as you can see by some of the comments from speakers on Twitter, it's shaping up to be a great schedule. Topics like CouchDb, component architecture, design patterns, Redis and dependency injection will all be there.

We are happy to announce that planning is underway for the 2011 Zend/PHP Conference which will be held in Santa Clara, October 17-20. ZendCon 2011 will be the best conference yet and we would like to invite you to be a part of it! A conference is only as good as its speakers and we are looking for the best speakers to share their knowledge and expertise with the PHP community. Attendees will include developers, architects, development managers, decision makers, core PHP developers and community members.

The key themes they're looking for this year are cloud computing, mobile and user experience and enterprise/professional PHP topics. Within those themes there's several other sub-categories including:

• Architecture & Best Practices
• Zend Framework 1&2
• Rich Internet Apps and Mobile/Tablet - Flash /Flex/HTML 5/CSS3/Ajax
• Standards Compliance
• Real World Case Studies, Designs and Data Models

The Call for Papers will close on May 20th, 2011 and speakers will be given a hotel night for each of their sessions that are accepted. Submit your ideas at www.zendcon.com/input to see if you'll be selected!

UPDATE: for a bit more information on the categories, see this new post on Kevin Schroeder's blog.