Here's the promised ramblecast that was recorded at php|tek 2008. Paul headed it up and Sean only showed his um.. voice for the last 30s. Lots of guests. Too many to list, in fact. Thanks to everyone who participated.

You can either just grab the episode directly (mp3) or you can get this and many more great shows by throwing their feed into your favorite aggregator and letting it go.

For the past four years, I have put a lot of work into executing a strategic plan that is tangentially connected with our conferences. [...] Instead [of trying to force interaction], I decided to try and slowly steer things in a direction that would have made our conferences closer to a family reunion than a dry business meetup.

He mentions the steps in his "evil plan" (for conference domination?) - community participation, setting the right atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, the oh-so-secret choosing of the speakers and their leadership by example through participation with the speakers and other conference goers.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

Obviously, questions were asked about two things - the Zend buyout and whether or not they have stopped talks with Yahoo. The answer to the first was a "no, we're not doing that" and the second was a more vague "we're not done talking to them" sort of answer. Another discussion included Microsoft's contributions to the Zend Core - how they're handled and if they're contributed back.

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

• the php|tek live site
• slides (as they get them
• Photos on Flickr tagged with "tek08"

• Ivo Jansch: Day -1, Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (and wrapup)
• Eli White: Heading to php|tek
• Greg Beaver: phar is near at php|tek
• Ivo Jansch's coverage of the Zend/Microsoft issue during Joe Stagner's keynote
• Brian DeShong's slides - The Grown-Up Company's Guide to Development and Robust Batch Processing with PHP
• Maggie Nelson slides - Keeping You DB and PHP in Sync, Angering the Database Gods
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - Type-Safe Objects in PHP, Understanding the PHP Object Model, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• a wrapup of the conference from Ben Ramsey
• Matthew Turland's look back at the conferece
• Gennady Feldman's wrapup
• Maggie Nelson's slides for Angering the Database Gods
• a heads-up from Marco Tabini to look in the near future for some incriminating video of some php|architect staff in KISS outfits
• Jeff Moore's wrapup of this year's conference and links to his slides - Exceptional PHP and Coding for Success: Writing Software You'll Be Able To Understand Next Month
• Another recap by Andrew Culver
• slides from Greg Beaver - PEAR, Phar and Smart PHP
• slides from Ed Finkler's talks - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR, Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecinfo
• an overview from Christopher Jones

Check out more live from the conference on the php|tek Live page on the php|architect website.

You can follow general conference happenings in various places: on Twitter, the #phptek channel on the Freenode IRC network, Planet-PHP and from the live feed.

You can also keep up with some of the twitter talk from those attending via the hashtags entry for "#phptek".

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

Seat sales for our php|tek 2008 conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and 23rd, are starting to pick up, and over 40% of all available spots have already been reserved.

You can signup on their conference website as well as get all of the details on the four day event including the speaker schedule, hotel and travel information - even a Boss Help section to help with convincing your local PHB.

The schedule for php|tek 2008 offers over 50 sessions and tutorials from the best of the best in the world of PHP, including the developers of Digg and Facebook, core PHP developers, RIA experts, PHP 5 migration gurus, security giants... and much, much more!

Included in the list are many of the "regulars" - Ben Ramsey, Luke Welling, Sara Golemon, Derick Rethans and many, many more. Check the schedule for the full list and the times. You can also register and reserve your spot for the conference now. The page details out what all's included and the different pricing amount for different sorts of attendees.

I just want to drop a quick reminder that the php|tek 2008 Call for Papers is about to close (on Oct. 31), so if you've been dragging your feet, now would be a good time to stop doing that and send in your proposals.

Some of the topics they're interested in this year are rich application development, PHP4->PHP5 migration and looks head at PHP6. Check out the Call for Papers page on the php|tek site for the full list of information you'll need to include along with the summary for your proposal.