The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

New on WebReference.com is this look (part of a series) at working with XML in PHP, this time it's specifically covering the DOM functionality.

With this series of articles, I will try to simplify and demystify the use and application of XML and the DOM. First, we will look at what XML is and then move on to what functions are available for use to manipulate and use XML.

The tutorial introduces XML and gives a sample structure of a document and breaks it down to explain each of the parts. Following that they look at some of the XML-related functionality to create their sample XML file.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog looking at using the MS-Excel Stream Handler class to push your data out to Excel (in more than just a CSV file).

If you're looking for an easy way to output your data from a PHP script into a Excel file, you've got to check out this script which I came across at the PHP Classes site. What this script essentially does is to implement a stream handler interface to write Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files.

Code snippets are included showing how to structure the data for the import and how to push that generated Excel file out to the user's waiting client.

One of the features included in the PHP 5.x releases is type hinting for validating that you have the right values for your functions and methods coming in. In this new post to his blog Ilia Alshanetshy takes a look at the the feature and gives a patch to add it .

On a general level most people agree it would be a good idea to have, since it is an optional feature and does not introduce any regressions, heck you can even mix type hinted code with the non-type hinted one. The "PROBLEM" has always been combining of PHP's typeless nature with type hinting, which is where the consensus has been difficult (impossible) to reach.

He mentions an example of why its such an issue (technically, both 1 and "1" are valid numbers) and includes a link to a patch that gives a new hint to help with the problem.

On the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has posted a look at PHP 5.3 from a slightly different perspective - how development with it affects the management.

At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.

He talks about why you should consider the move up to PHP 5.3 and some of the things you should use to handle (and pay attention to) the migration.

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• Doug Brown's Blog: Zend_Cache is Saving me Money!
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• Mike Bernat's Blog: Installing Xdebug - Best Decision You Will Ever Make
• SaniSoft Blog: Code sniffs for CakePHP and then some more
• Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: Tutorial at ZendCon 2007
• PHPFreaks.com: PHP Security
• Lukas Smith's Blog: Making PHP 5.3 Happen
• Hiveminds Magazine: How to bridge PHP and Java on Windows with Apache Tomcat
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• Jaisen Methai's Blog: Stop including class files and use __autoload() instead

As is mentioned on the ServerGrove blog (here) the Symfony project is holding a contest to get help from the community and offer monthly prizes.

Pascal Borreli came up with a great idea to involve the symfony developer community and advance the development of the framework. The event is called one-day-one-ticket and it will give monthly prizes to the developer that fixes the most bugs in symfony. While it is still a good idea to contribute to the community anyway and get your merit badges, a little extra incentive always helps.

This post on the Symfony blog gets more into the details of the contest. To enter you have to sign up and close one ticket a day for the month. You'll then be entered to win one of that month's prizes including copies of books, a "surprise gift" or a contribution from ServerGrove.

The initial list of the speakers for this year's ZendCon conference has been posted. Speakers at this year's event include:

• Ed Finkler
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Jeff Moore
• Derick Rethans
• Chris Shiflett
• Aaron Wormus
• Andrei Zmievski

And many more - check out the full list to see what you can expect for this year's ZendCon!

If you're planning on attending the CodeWorks conference in your area (or where ever the closest stop might be), you might want to check out this extra incentive to register for your pass early - the possibility that your ticket could be free!

We're so excited that the schedule for CodeWorks 09 is finally online that we have decided to come up with a great promotion: if you sign up for CW09 before July 6th, your ticket could be free-or you could win a "Master Subscription" to all of php|architect's books and magazines! Read on for more info.

If you register before July 6th (just five days away!) you'll be entered into the contest to win one of several prizes, the top being a full refund on your ticket and a free pass to your CodeWorks city of choice. Other prizes include a "master" subscription to php|architect magazine and "master access" to all of their books.

Of course, there's some rules that go along with the giveaway, so be sure to look them over before you enter.

Kae Verens has posted a quick post looking at combining the jQuery javascript library with a PHP backend to create a more advanced calendaring system for your site.

I was supposed to write about Datatables for chapter 6, but the website of the plugin I was going to use (http://www.datatables.net/) was down for about a week, and so I wrote about Calendars instead. [...] In chapter 6 of the book, I'll walk through how to build a simple calendar, including creation and editing of events, and including once-off and recurring events.

You can see a demo of the script, an image of the result and download the code if you want to get started directly.