Good news! We've managed to acquire a conference ticket for the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, on June 8th and 9th, to give away to our readers. We know that since you're reading techPortal, you are interested in technology in general and probably PHP in particular. The Dutch PHP Conference is one of the leading european conferences for PHP content and we hope you can join us there!

The ticket to this year's Conference also includes admittance into the Dutch Mobile Conference if you're interested in that as well. You can find out more about the Dutch PHP Conference on the main event site.

Ok PHP fans, we don't do this often, but once a year we do give away a ticket to php|tek to one lucky programmer. This year, however, you are going to have to work for it. Starting Friday, April 13th, 2012, those of us who work at php|architect will tweet clues, and you are going on a web scavenger hunt. That's right, dig up other people's websites, trash their JavaScript and generally make a nuisance of yourself as you follow the clues to the…well, you'll just have to wait and see.

You'll need to follow the php|architect folks on Twiiter (Elizabeth Tucker, Marco Tabini and Cal Evans) to get clues about the hunt. First prize is a ticket to php|tek this year but other prizes include a ticket to their next Virtual Summit, any three books from their catalog and a free one-year subscription to the magazine.

Once you've found the solution, you'll need to enter it here to be entered. Good luck!

GrUSP is organising a tweet contest and its prizes will be two tickets, one for each conference. The contest will start today (March 29th) at 1pm CEST and will end April 1st at 7pm CEST.

Anyone can enter - all you have to do is tweet a post with a few things: the "#grsup" hashtag, a mention of the twitter accounts for the events, a link to the conference site and something about the event. Be sure and get those tweets posted before April 1st a 9am CEST - they'll pick the winners soon after! (Oh and multiple entries are accepted so the more you tweet, the better your chances!)

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 to announce that we have just published the schedule and registration is now open. Quickly, go and check out all the great content we have to offer this year! Once you've decided that you want to join us, you can go to the registration page to order your tickets. Please note that you will get a 15% early bird discount if you order your tickets before 15th April. Ticket prices were announced last week and can be found in this blogpost.

Topics in this year's event include:

• Testing with Behat
• Zend Framework 2
• Backbone.js
• OAuth
• Elastic Search
• RESTful web services
• Puppet
• Coding/deploying/scaling with Amazon AWS

You can get your tickets on their registration page with the early bird pricing for all tickets lasting until April 1st. When ordering the full pass or tutorial-only, you will be asked to specify the tutorial you wish to attend.

In our previous blogposts we announced that we would publish the schedule on 15th February. It seems however that this date was a bit too optimistic, and that we need a bit more time to get everything in order. So hang in there, the schedule will be published next week! If you want to be first in the know, make sure you follow @dpcon on twitter.

They've already posted the prices for the tickets though:

• Tutorial Day: 350 Euro (Regular), 297,50 Euro (Early Bird)
• Conference Days: 350 Euro (Regular), 297,50 Euro (Early Bird)
• Full conference: 630 Euro (Regular), 535,50 Euro (Early Bird)

The Early Bird prices are only good from the start of registration until April 15th, so keep an eye out for their announcements about the opening of their registration. You can get more information about the conference from the event's website.

As it is customary, while we work on receiving proposals, rating them, and coming up with a final schedule for php|tek 2012, we are offering "Charter tickets" at 50% off the full price for a "Full Experience" ticket that includes access to both the tutorial day and the main conference - that's four days of learning, networking, and just plain fun for the lowest price we'll ever offer, period.

The Charter tickets are $750 USD this year and give you full access to both the tutorial day and full conference days for the rest of the week. There's a limited supply of these pre-schedule tickets, so be sure you pick up yours now to get in on the deal.

When? February 29 - March 02, 2012. Where? Hilton Bonaventure Hotel, Montreal downtown. How much? $600 (instead of $800). This rate is valid if you order before January 13, 2012.

You can order your ticket today in a variety of flavors - just a conference pass or conference plus a tutorial - either Advanced PHP, Security (both in French and English versions), Symfony2 or HTML5. Ticket prices range from $700 CAD to $400 CAD, depending on which tutorial is selected (or if it's selected at all).

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.