PHP Barcelona 2008 is a user group run conference, costing only 20 Euros for people to attend and it managed to garnish around 200 - 300 people, which shows that the PHP Spain scene is quite vibrant and alive. The conference was run really well and the venue is truly amazing, given people paid 20 euros to enter, everyone went wow as to the quality given the payment ratio.

He gave a talk of his own (PEAR installer) and was happily surprised with the quality an organization of the conference.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage by about 10%.

It also mentions Felix De Vliegher who, because of his large volume of tests (and quality of them), was granted commit rights into the PHP repository to add his in himself. The list of elePHPant winners is included as well. You can also still submit tests through the TestFest submission site (just not for any of the rewards).

PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics.

Topics included QA/Testing, web application deployment a look at PHP's document object model functionality and some presentations on Project Zero, the new PHP lexer, eZ Components and database abstraction.

• A summary from the PHP Women website
• Lorna Mitchell's slides from the conference - PHP Deployment with SVN
• A wrapup from Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Shots from Flickr tagged for the conference
• some thoughts from Paul Wander of Ibuildings on the conference

Looks like the conference was a great success - thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Ibuildings team and Zend.

Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica's account of her day.

Ghica's day included Zeev Suraski's talk, Marco Tabini's presentation on mayo (oh, and application design) and well as talks from Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchell and Stefan Priebsch (oh, and the infamous Terry Chay).

• Stefan Priebsch's slides - PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A Look Ahead
• Ivo Jansch's wrapaup
• Helgi's coverage of each day - Day 1
• Lorna Mitchell's experience giving her talk there at the conference and her first day summary
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - New Features in PHPUnit 3.3, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

If you weren't able to attend, be sure to check out some of the pictures from the conference over on Flickr (and if you were there, be sure to tag your own pictures with "dpc08").

• Ben Ramsey - Distribution and Publication with Atom Web Services, Giv You Site a Boost with Memcache
• Mike Lively - Advanced PHP Unit Testing, Automated Unit Testing - Getting Started
• Tony Bibbs - Fed Up of the Framework Hype?, SOAP_Toolkit - Constact-First and Code-First Web Services for PHP
• an overview from Christopher Jones

Keep an eye on this post for more updates as other presenters post their slides and summaries of the event!

Jeff Loiselle, Nate Abele, Mariano Iglesias, Peter Vanhee, Antonio De Marco, Paul Kruger, Timo Derstappen, Frederic Bollon, and Yann Le Blevac wrap up CakeFest at 1am in the hotel lobby.

You can either grab the mp3 directly or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and other great episodes as they come out. The Show is recorded live and listeners can ask questions of the hosts in real-time via the CakePHP channel on the Freenode IRC network.

• Richard Thoamas
• Elizabeth Naramore
• Matthew Turland
• Ligaya Turmelle
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Sara Golemon: Days 0/1, Day 2
• Elizabeth Smith: Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
• Zend Developer Zone
• Wez Furlong
• Christian Flickinger

Check out the official ZendCon blogs page for even more!

The echoes from the last OSCON parties haven't even stopped reverberating though the halls as the next convention moves in. The vendors are all long gone and the attendees are all shoved in tiny seats on their express flight back to the real world. Let's take a quick look over our shoulder at the party that was OSCON '07 before answering the call of the road and heading off to the next event.

Some of his items of note included the PHP tutorials (specifically the "PHP and MySQL Best Practices" from Luke Welling and Laura Thomson) and the many talks including one given by Andi Gutmans covering the Zend Framework and its role in a mashup involving Yahoo's Term Extractor and Flickr.