• Steph Fox, editor of php|architect
• Ivo Jansch, CTO at Ibuildings
• Scott MacVicar, contributor to PECL and PHP core
• Felix De Vliegher, PHP Belgium organiser and PHP core contributor

The PHPNW conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and is a day-long even packed with great speakers and now a great panel discussion too. You can still register for your tickets on the conference website.

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Some of the observations/comments she mentions include:

• Freelancing PHP developers may not feel like attending a group with "the competition"
• Several factors dissuade developers from attending (distance, confusing schedules, timing)
• Some ideas that groups out there could use to attract and keep more members
• Why the groups can make you a better developer
• and some sponsorship/promotion ideas to help grow and better the group

This is a great post packed with some good suggestions and observations. If you're involved at all in your local group (or would like to be) be sure to read it.

The conference features speakers such as Derick Rethans and Rob Allen (see the schedule for more speakers), and at 50 GBP it's very good value for money for PHP developers. [...] We're also sending a bunch of our developers there, and we have a booth, so if you want to meet us or land a cool job, come talk to us at the conference.

The PHPNW conference will be held November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and has several exciting things going for it - a great list of speakers, a recently announced panel discussion on the state of the PHP community and a free one year subscription to every attendee for php|architect magazine.

This will be a panel discussion on the topic "State of the Community" and will bring together some of the leading lights of the community to discuss the PHP community as a whole, how people can get involved, and how the community relates to PHP as a day job. If there's a question you'd like to see the panel answer, please post it in the comments below and we'll include as many as we can!

The conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and there's still spots open if you'd like to attend.

Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.

You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

I still come across a person now and then who does not appreciate the power that any server control panel gives you. [...] They reduce the margin of error that a human can bring to the table when editing files and performing commands "by hand". If host control panels are so good, why would you want to write your own control panel when there are so many out there already? Well, the answer is, there aren't any open source ones.

He talks about starting out right by defining the build and the technology to use and only then gets started coding. His application uses the Cognify framework, SQLite, Nanoweb and, of course, PHP. At the end of this part of the series, you'll have the framework set up and a sample module in place to mess with.

As I mentioned previously, I'll be at MIX this year on a panel discussing ASP and PHP interoperability, along with Jesse Liberty, Bill Staples, Joe Stagner and Brian Goldfarb.

I've been told that MIX has sold out and that there is a lot of interest in our slot, so I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about, but I'm looking for questions to break the ice and get things rolling.

If you know a little bit about the topic and would like to help out with questions of your own, send them along to Wez via email - wez@php.net.

We recently removed the control panel script from the trunk. [...] This script is now back as a plugin, and called sfControlPanelPlugin. It's been improved a bit, and now contains a better code browser, a better task executer, a new configuration explorer, and a data explorer that allows browsing data contained in the project's database. We also harmonized its look and feel with the symfony default pages. Check it out and try it, you might never use the CLI again...

Check out the screenshot to see what it's like or, as they recommend, just check it out for yourself in the latest version from the trunk.

My schedule was crammed right after php|works 2006, so I could not find an earlier possibility to blog. Anyway, the extended entry contains my short report on php|arch's second conference this year.

He talks about some sightseeing before-hand, Tutorial Day, XML Security demos, Unicode in PHP6, a "slight problem" concerning his laptop, and his role on the Zend PHP5 Certification Panel. Check out the full entry for all of the details and "expect a separate blog entry later" on his experience on the panel.

He mentions giving his second talk, "Migration to PHP 5.1", going well, and has links to both sets of slides:

• Future Development of PHP Applications
• Migrating to PHP 5.1

Davey also uploaded some new pictures to the php|tek photo stream for those that aren't able to attend.