This is the ninth 'social' interview in a series with the phpDay 2012 speakers: it's 'social' because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook. We are happy to introduce you Giorgio Sironi, a freelance PHP developer and PHPUnit_Selenium mantainer.

The questions cover a wide range of topics including:

• His thoughts about functional programming
• What he thinks of traits in PHP 5.4
• Which open source projects he follows the most
• What features he'd like to see in future versions of PHP

You can read the full interview here. You can also find out more about this year's conference (and get your tickets - hurry! it's next week!) on the main conference site.

• The MicroPHP Manifesto (Ed Finkler)
• Get Some Rest: Best RESTful API Practices (Lorna Mitchell)
• Daemonizing PHP (Andy Blyler)
• A Stitch In Time Saves Nine: Solving the N+1 Problem (Paul Jones)
• Social Commerce with magento and Open Graph (John Jawed)

There's lots more on the list too, so check out the full list for the PHP track at this year's event! OSCON is being held July 16-20th in Portland, Oregon. For more information on tickets see this page on the conference site.

This is the second 'social' interview in a series with the phpDay 2012 speakers: it's 'social' because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook. We are happy to introduce you Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop), co-founder of PHPBenelux, now active in the PFZ.nl events team , symfony community manager. He will give a session at phpDay called "A Practical Look At Symfony2" Saturday May 19th at 12 am on track 1.

They talk about Stefan's framework choice process, his thoughts on functional programming, what he thinks of traits in PHP 5.4 and what Open Source projects he's following the closest.

You can find out more about Stefan's session and the conference at http://2012.phpday.it.

We are very happy to announce the first confirmed speakers for the jsDay and phpDay 2012!

jsDay: Mark Boas (jPlayer/Happyworm), Greg Schechter (YouTube),Christopher Rhodes (Google) and Brandon Keepers (GitHub) , the full list here.

phpDay: Rasmus Lerdorf (Php creator), Zeev Suraski (CTO at Zend, Co-architect of PHP), Lorna Jane Mitchell (PhpWomen) and David Coallier (Orchestra CTO) and many other, the full talk list here.

Their Early Bird tickets are on sale until April 1st for both of these two-day events, so be sure you pick up your tickets now before this great discount expires! (jsDay tickets, phpDay tickets)

We are happy and proud to announce the speaker line-up for the 2012 edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. We already released our tutorials on November 16th, but this is the real deal. Speaker bio's, talk abstracts and schedule will be added later. Please note that this list is subject to change.

Sessions for this year's event include:

• Tobias Schlitt: Writing testable code
• Sebastian Marek: Magic Behind the Numbers - Software Metrics In Practice
• Nick Belhomme: PHP traits, treat or threat?
• Jordi Boggiano: Redis - Your advanced in-memory key-value store
• Stephan Hochdörfer: The state of DI in PHP
• Craig Kitterman: Enterprise Class Cloud for the Average Joe

Tickets are still at their Early Bird prices (but only until December 16th!) and you can get a pass for both the tutorial day and main conference day for just 260 Euro. If you just want to attend the conference, that ticket is only 135 Euro. You can order them here. If you want to attend one of the tutorials, you'll need to specify that by ordering the related ticket.

The PHPBenelux team only announced the names of tutorial speakers, but with names like Ivo Jansch, Torsten Rhinne, Fabien Potencier and Matthew Weier O'Phinney you know it's going to rock! And that's tutorials only. It's all happening on January 27 and 28, so make sure you block those days in your calendar, because the center of Europe is going to buzz PHP like it never had before!

The tickets can be purchased here for the Early Bird rates (until December 16th) of 260 Euro for the full event (conference+tutorials) and 135 Euro for just the conference.

In his post Joshua talks about the conference in general - the quality of the talks he went to and the community he experienced while there. He also mentions his presentation, "Puppet for Dummies" and some sessions from the Unconference.

Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend adds his perspective and mentions some of the new technologies that were introduced during the event including their PHPCloud platform and the Zend Application Fabric.

Zend anticipates its biggest ever conference due to growing interest in the practical use of PHP to develop cloud applications, which is reflected in the 400 percent increase in cloud-related submissions to this year's Call for Papers. Strong interest in enterprise mobility, web automation and PHP advances are also reflected in this year's content. ZendCon 2011 will offer keynotes by industry and enterprise IT leaders, in-depth technical sessions and tutorials, technology previews, vendor exhibits and networking opportunities. The event targets professional developers, IT/development managers, system administrators and business managers interested in PHP technologies and solutions for web, mobile and cloud.

The point out a few highlights of this year's even including topics like cloud infrastructure, RIAs, mobile devices, application architecture and best practices. There'll also be a preview of what's coming in Zend Framework 2.0 as related to its cloud integration functionality. You can learn more about the conference and get your tickets at ZendCon.com.

We believe the schedule already has a lot to offer the way it is, but we still had one annoying "to be announced" slot on the Friday morning: the opening keynote! With only three weeks to go we are proud to announce that the DPC will be kicked off by one of the most talented speakers out there: Aral Balkan!

He'll talk about making "beautiful, delightful and fun things" as a part of the experience your user has with your applications. If you haven't gotten your tickets yet, be sure to grab them now. There's only three weeks left until the event! Full tickets cost 695 Euro and the half-tickets (just conference day or just tutorial day) are 375 Euro.

We talked about the PHP Community Conference a couple of months ago. At the time, we got on board because of the philosophy and leadership behind it. Community is what drives PHP and the PHP community is not only about the code, but also about sharing ideas, workflow, tools, collaboration, vision and startups.

This time they look at things slightly different and mention some of the folks presenting sessions for the event. These include names familiar to the community including Rasmus Lerdorf, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Lorna Mitchell and Joel Perras. If you'd like more information about the event or to just pick up a ticket of your own, check out the PHP Community Conference website.