The schedule for the Symfony Live conference in San Franscico has just been published. For the first time in the US, Symfony developers will be able to take the Symfony certification exam on September 29th. You can already register.

They're also still looking for sponsors for the event if you'd like to help out. You can also go purchase a ticket if you know you'd like to attend this year's event (September 26th through 29th in San Francisco, CA).

We are proud to announce that Engine Yard is now the first official sponsor of the open source project, the Lithium PHP framework. We believe that Lithium holds a great deal of promise and we want to help it reach its full potential. Therefore, not only are we pledging our financial support, we will be working together to promote the framework to our customers and partners and the community at large through conferences, meetups and webcasts.

The post names some of the core development team (including Garrett Woodworth and Nate Abele) and suggests following the Lithium and EngineYard twitter accounts for future details.

We're back with more good news! Our friends at php|architect are sponsoring the Dutch PHP Conference 2011 with a sweet deal: they're offering every attendee a free, one-year subscription to their awesome php|architect magazine! In case you're not familiar with it, php|architect is a monthly magazine (pdf, epub and mobi version available) that features articles, columns and more awesomeness on PHP.

If you haven't already gotten your tickets, now is the perfect time - you can get a full conference pass for 595 Euro or either a tutorial-only/conference-only pass for 325 Euro.

While both Derick and I live and breathe Open Source and like to hack on code things like work and private life do interfere with the development of our Open Source software projects. So with development efforts like this we can either wait for the time when "we have nothing else to do" or try to find support from the people that use the development tools we create on a daily basis that allows to work on new features for said tools sooner rather than later. [...] A platform such as Pledgie, where many individuals can pledge small (and not so small :-) amounts of money could be the solution we are looking for [as support].

Sebastian also gets into detail about the bug that has been keeping Xdebug from cooperating 100% with the profiling functionality it offers and some missing information. A few lines missing from the output are causing trouble with more current versions of KCacheGrind because of stricter adherence to the file format's standards. If you've considered giving to a project, whether this is a bug that's bothered you or not, the Xdbug campaign could always use the motivation.

When we first heard about this conference and what it was going to be we knew we wanted to be involved. It's about community, workflow, problem solving and PHP, right up our alley! There is no way we are going to miss this one; this is exactly what was missing in the PHP conference circuit. [...] Let's face it, the stories are the best part of any conference, and here we will have a conference that promises only stories. Just icing, no cake :) We'll take it.

The conference, happening April 21st and 22nd in Nashville, will be about telling the stories of your software development, not just about the tech. For more information check out the conference website at phpcon.org.

ServerGrove will be sponsoring the PHPBenelux Conference 2011 this year. PHPBenelux is one of the most active PHP organizations in Europe steadily promoting knowledge sharing events like this one. The 2011 conference offers an awesome schedule over two days. Friday January 28th offers tutorial sessions in the morning and the main conference starts in the afternoon with three simultaneous tracks.

The tickets for the event range from a Conference Only pass for 150 Euro out to a full Conference + Tutorial Day pass for 300 Euro (you can get yours here). They'll be having talks on a huge range of topics including geolocation, Doctrine, SOA, Varnish, the Zend Framework and software management tools. Additionally, if you'd like to get an idea of the great quality of the sessions that'll be presented, check out the PHP Benelux site for audio from the 2010 event.

Since the last time I blogged about the next Symfony Live Conference, I have a whole lot of exiting news. First of all, because I receive a lot of questions about the language of the conference, I want to say again that the whole conference will be held in English only. As a matter of fact, I can tell you than people from 24 countries have already registered for the conference.

Updates to the sessions include the addition of Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Dustin Whittle. The Training Day will be right before the conference and will have five tracks going at once. Check out the post for more on the updated sponsor listing.

It feels like a long time since we started on this road in February 2009. So much has happened since then ... and now we are two days away from the 9th May when several European groups will run events. We have 22 groups registered in all, Munich and Quebec have already run successful events. [...] It's great to see user groups helping out with PHP development in this way - I'm just amazed and humbled by the enthusiasm and talent of PHP users.

She takes a second to thank sponsors - including Microsoft and Ibuildings (including their swag). The event will last through the end of June and test numbers will be calculated and evaluated for inclusion quickly after. You can get an idea of the current testing runs here.

Currently Zend certification is one of the only options available to PHP devs who want to get accredited, however. But judging by general feedback from the community it would appear that, despite the current certification choices, quality discrepancies between PHP devs on the market can still be pretty...impressive.

He points to another post from Darren Hague (on Derren's SAP blog) that has three elements that any good certification needs to really be considered successful:

• Quality - it must be professional and independent
• Portability - it must be independent of the company you work for at the time
• Customer Demand - without demand for certified people in that area, there's no reason to have the certification

Be sure and check out some of the comments to Demian's post form some other opinions.

It's time to start getting the 2009 PHP TestFest underway. The TestFest is a worldwide event in which PHP user groups and individuals contribute to PHP by writing tests for PHP. It's a great way to contribute to one of the most successful open source projects there has ever been, it's also pretty cool to see your name in the the source distribution for code that's running on over 20 million web domains.

If you're a user group (or really just want to participate), send an email over to the PHP qa list (php-qa@lists.php.net) with your preferred date and a primary contact for the group. The groups/people will then be listed over on the PHP wiki so you can check to see if there's others in your area already participating.

Things are just getting organized, but there's already a few things in the works - a SVN repository where participants can commit tests directly (instead of funneling them all through a few people like before), some sponsors (maybe elePHPants!) and the search for mentors to help out those writing tests and can do the final review/commit of the user-submitted tests.

More event and contact information can be found near the end of her post.