Web & PHP Magazine invites you to its first ever conference. This four-day event in September will immerse you in a world of continuously changing and evolving web technologies. Developers will get together and trade great ideas at Web & PHP Con. Whether your interests lay in core PHP, security, testing, architecture, frameworks or cloud, this is the place for you. Maybe HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, UX, mobile web or web-based mobile apps are where it's at for you. That's okay - we'll have loads. And if Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery or strategies are in your presentation bucket list, you won't be disappointed. Come and hear about latest technologies and methods, discuss your own project developments and find new solutions.

They've also opened their call for papers so you can submit your own ideas to present. There's a wide range of themes they're looking for at the event including things like:

• Core PHP
• Testing & Quality
• HTML5 & CSS3
• Mobile Web, Responsive Design
• User Experience Design (UX)
• E-Commerce, Magento, etc

Hurry and get your submissions in though - the deadline is April 26th!

CakeFest is the annual CakePHP Conference. It brings together developers, users, and interested parties from all over the world for a four day event filled with workshops, talks, dinners, social events and plenty of fun! If you are interested in giving a talk at CakeFest, we still have submissions open! Just head over to the CakeFest, sign up and submit your talk proposal via your account page! We're open to anyone for submissions, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can also purchase tickets to this year's event (with a discount for students) ranging from $420 USD for just the conference out to $950 for the conference + tutorial days. They'll have talks from core CakePHP developers, time for lightening talks and a panel discussion where you can ask your own questions of the Core development team. You can get complete details about this event on the conference website.

For those who haven't put the recurring event in their calendar, the Zend Framework Monthly Bug-hunt is here again! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday (the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of September), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework.

Included in the post are instructions on how to find issues in their new Jira configuration (unresolved issues), where you can go to get involved - including the zftalk.dev IRC channel and their "Getting Started" guide.

The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and the surrounding area, and also evangelizing the PHP technology to universities and enterprises as well.

The group has held other events this year but this one is the first which will be completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others.

For more information about the Barcelona PHP Conference 2008, including more information on the location, speakers and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es.

This year again, DOP organizes the symfony camp. The event takes place on the 12th and 13th of September. This is a unique opportunity to meet the community. The camp will start with a training on symfony 1.1, given by Nicolas Perriault (symfony 1.1 release manager). The second day is packed with great talks.

Speakers already lined up for the event include Dustin Whittle, Fabian Lange, Lambert Beekhuis and Ian Christian. Check out the official site for more information on where it's happening and to reserve your spot today.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

PHPCamp is a 'ad-hoc gathering' for PHP community. It similar to barcamp, but more focused towards PHP based web application development. This means that anyone can come to PHPCamp and participate.

Right now the details are pretty tentative, but the even is scheduled to happen on September 20th and will last all day. They're still looking for a venue but you can go ahead and add your name to their list of campers if you'd like to attend.

What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise. Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where Enterprise PHP (and OSS) is going and how it's going to get there. This promises to be a great evening with plenty of "horsepower" to answer your questions.

Speakers for the evening will be Mark de Visser, Zend's CMO and David Boloker, IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies. The meeting will be happening on Tuesday, September 11th starting at around 6:30pm. The meeting will be held in Cambridge at 1 Rodger's Street. Check out the official announcement of the meeting for full details.

Highlights in this issue include:

• "Is PHP 5 really slower than PHP 4?" by Andi Gutmans and Dmitry Stogov
• "State of the PEAR" contributed by Aaron Wormus, a walkthrough of the history of PEAR
• "Know Your Stuff" from Philip Olson, looking at the PHP Manual
• "Desperately Seeking Susan" by Tom Gidden, a look at the basics of creating a search engine
• and, of course the Security Corner (Ilia Alshanetsky) is back with part two of the look at configuration in PHP

You can either pick up this issue by itself (about $4.20 USD) or as a part of a shiny, new subscription (about $35.00 USD).

The work of the last six months is finally bearing fruit and I will be able to spend my spare time on coding again instead of just writing. If you wondered, why patTemplate or any of my other open source projects did not show any progress, this announcement should answer your questions.

I put nearly all of my thoughts on software architecture, OO design and patterns into this book and thus it consists of 370 pages dealing with OO development in PHP 5.1, creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioural patterns as well as enterprise patterns and MVC architectures. Furthermore it covers SPL, Propel and patTemplate to provide some real-life examples of the patterns.

A note to all readers out there, though - the book is in German (despite the English title). If you want to check out a sample bit of code from the book or just want to get more information on it, check out it's website.