Courtesy of an update to this post on the Zend Develoer Zone site, there's a bit more detail from Hannes Magnusson, himself (the developer behind the recent changes to the PHP.net website) in a new blog post on his site.

As many of you know I changed the frontpage of php.net recently by moving conference announcements and call for papers to its own dedicated page in a desperate attempt to regain the control of our frontpage.

The rest of the post discusses the points of "why?", "regain control?", "what gave you the right?" and even links to a patch that puts a "conference teaser" back on the page (near the top).