n my session, I talked about the history of Phorum. One of the things I covered was the early days of PHP. Back in the 90s, before PHP, most dynamic web work was done in C or Perl. At that time, in those worlds, you had to do all the HTTP work yourself. [...] PHP changed all that. You had a default content type of text/html. You had automatic handling of request variables. Cookies were easily ingested and output. You could template your HTML with script instead of having to write everything out via print or stdout. It was amazing. Who could ask for more?

He talks about frameworks as a tool, but not one that everyone really needs. For quite a few sites, they can be overkill and time spent implementing them could be used for other things. For those that want to use them, there's lots of flavors to pick from, but he reminds you to be mindful of performance trade-offs. He mentions the commoditization of frameworks and how frameworks, like it or not, are everywhere (even if it's just lightweight custom code you threw together for a prototype).

Check out today's schedule for more information what the sessions are and summaries of what they're about. This morning's sessions are tutorials from Lorna Mitchell (web services) and Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Mastering Zend Framework 2 Patterns).

You can also follow the official conference twitter account at @phpcomcon for the latest updates.

The PHP Community Conference is a two-day event. We kick things off with a tutorial day that will introduce you to tools and ideas that you can use in your code right away. The second day will consist of presentations that will inspire you to create something new with PHP.

The conference is happening April 21st and 22nd in Nashville, TN and tickets for the two-day event are $300 USD. There'll even be a Pecha Kucha event where two iPad2s will be given away. You can find out more about the schedule and the rest of the conference on the event's website.