The PHPNW group has officially posted their Call for Papers today for the upcoming conference (being held in Manchester):

phpnw08 will take place on Saturday 22nd November 2008 at Manchester Central Exhibition Centre. phpnw08 is organised by developers for developers and is the perfect opportunity to learn, network and mix with peers and industry leaders, as well as discover the latest tricks, techniques and innovations in PHP and internet development. The conference will have a mix of in-depth and shorter talks.

If you're interested in presenting, you'll need to submit an abstract that's between 250-500 words like and would last about 55 minutes presented normally. Shorter talks should be about 25 minutes with some time for Q&A after. Submit your proposal via the form to be considered. The final day for submissions is Septemper 21st and accepted papers will be notified by September 29th.

In this new post to the symfony blog, there's an update on the framework's latest version, Propel integration and the addition of the sfDoctrinePlugin.

After more that two years of development, the Propel team has released Propel 1.3 yesterday. This is a great achievement as Propel 1.3 sports a lot a new exciting features.

These features include PDO integration, object instance pooling, improvements to the date handling features and the addition of more default values for database schemas. There's also the updates with Doctrine:

As announced in the symfony 1.2 roadmap, Doctrine 1.0 will be officially supported and the sfDoctrinePlugin will be bundled with symfony 1.2. Doctrine 1.0 beta1 has been released two weeks ago and the Doctrine team will release Doctrine 1.0 final on September 1st.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, there's a new look at working with the Drupal e-Commerce module in your Drupal installation.

What if you [also] want to support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other capabilities that could help increase traffic to your site, but are usually only found in content management systems (CMSs)? Is it possible to combine the best of both worlds - shopping carts and CMSs? Fortunately, the answer is yes, if you choose a world-class CMS such as Drupal as a foundation for your site.

They walk you through how to get the module installed, how to configure it to match with your site's layout and flow and how to hook the purchase process into PayPal to make purchasing a few simple user clicks away.

The DynamicWebPages.de site has mentioned details about the latest PHP World Kongress conference happening in Munich later this year (November 24th and 25th).

The PHP World congress offers on the first day three Workshops, per to one to the Zend Framework, eZ Components as well as Flow3, which Framework, on which in the future Typo3 will be based. [...] The second day focuses on "PHP in the Enterprise".

Speakers like Tobias Schlitt and Christian Wenz will be presenting. The attendance fee starts at about 490 Euro - check out the official site for more information on registration and the official schedule.

The ThinkPHP blog points out a recorded (German-only) webinar that Stefan Esser did covering the creation of secure LAMP applications.

Unfortunately, this Webinar was in German, but if you understand German you might be interested in the Webinar recording which is now available at MySQL's website.

The webinar looks at previous attack types, things that MySQL already includes to help prevent SQL injections, handling multi-byte caharacters and correct error handling.

Stuart Herbert has announced the release of a new site that takes the place of providing SMS messages to UK users from twitter, twittex.com - a site created with the symfony framework.

Last Thursday, twitter was forced to withdraw its free SMS alerts service to UK users. [...] Six days later, thanks to the power of symfony, PHP, mysql and q4m, we've built and launched a replacement service called twittex.com.

The site lets you prepay for the messages you want to use. Using the symfony framework made it easy to get a system up and running quickly and easily (in six days!) to fill the gap suddenly left by twitter's decision.

• Gregory Szorc's Blog: PHP Now Using Proper HTTP Status Codes on Error
• The Bakery: Five More Articles/Tutorials Posted
• PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHP
• Ben Ramsey's Blog: PHP Community T-Shirts
• PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
• DevArticles: Learning AJAX
• PHPBuilder.com: Email Forms in PHP
• PHP-Coding-Practices.com: Making CakePHP's Pagination work with Model::expects()
• Internet Super Hero Blog: PHP: mysqli_stmt_get_result()
• Stefan Mischook's Blog: Object Oriented PHP Tutorial Released
• David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)
• Rob Richards' Blog: PHP and Managed Information Cards
• Zend Developer Zone: AJAX Chat Tutorial Part 6 : Updating the User List
• Stefan Esser's Blog: CORE GRASP - PHP Tainted Mode
• php|architect: September/October Training Schedule Online

On the Ibuildings blog Ruud Alberts takes a look at iterators - what they are and how they're used (including the objects the SPL makes available).

Let's kickstart this blogpost by defining what an iterator actually is. According to wikipedia, an iterator is. A collection can pretty much be anything. The most obvious sources would be arrays, but other than that, iterations can be done over database resultsets, strings, datetime intervals, directories, file content and XML listings, to name a few.

He looks at the iterator interface that comes bundled in the SPL and how you can create a custom one to loop through your own data collection. He includes an example - a colorful string iterator that "pretties up" an HTML string with various colors.