As a result of the ZendCon advisory board for this year's event, Joe Devon has posted a guide that wants to help you get your talks accepted to conferences in the future (both PHP-related and not).

For those who don't know what an advisory board is, conference organizers get loads of proposals and need help deciding who should speak. So they ask others in the industry to provide some feedback. It was quite a learning experience.

He talks some about the "speaker backlash" that comes from being rejected, a lack of professionalism in some submittors and some basic (common sense) recommendations like:

• fill out the form completely, even if you don't think it's all useful
• start locally and then move up. A major conference isn't the place to try out your speaking first-shot
• whet the board's appetite - make them want to hear more about the topic or come up with something new
• share your unique experience with the technology
• use sites like Joind.in, Meetup and SlideShare to your advantage

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new tutorial posted showing you, step by step, how to install the bbPress software (from the folks that brought you WordPress.

bbPress is a forum software developed by the same folks who created WordPress. It's a lightweight bulletin board system that seems to be gaining traction lately. bbPress runs really well on our shared hosting plans so we decided to put together a quick tutorial on how to install bbpress on our systems.

Despite the description, the guide can be followed to install it just about everywhere thanks to the simple installation process bbPress uses. He links you to the latest download, gives you an example of what you can expect from the installer and talks about setting up the database. This is where is get specific, using their Plesk tool to set it up. This is only to set up the actual database, though - you can do this through any number of tools, including the command line.

On the Debuggable blog Felix Geisendorfer points out the need for some more "cooks in the kitchen" - people to fill some CakePHP related positions in companies all over.

There are new jobs in the world of CakePHP. The CakePHP job board has seen the following additions.

The new items include positions at About.com, Makatto.com and Blue Chips. Check out the job board for more information on these and other open CakePHP-related positions.

Michael Kimsal following the release of his new book from php|architect press, the "PHP Job Hunter's Handbook", has relaunched the book's website with lots of new content and features.

After a job move last summer, and the book getting shifted from self-publish to external publisher, I unfortunately let the blog grow stale. I've relaunched it today with an explanation about what happened, and some more detail about the progress of the book over the last year.

He's also started up a new series where he'll review the PHP-related job boards out there. He's started off with a look at PHPjobs.com (based on the JobThread.com platform).

Stoyan Stefanov has come up against one of the frustrations of web development involving cookies - problems caused by the switch from a "www." in the host to none. He's come up with a test to show you how cookies are set and where you can access them from.

One of the implications of following the rule is related to the whole www vs no-www question. Basically you should always use www if you're planning to use any other sub-domains and you want them cookie-free. This is because you have no way to set a cookie only to the top-level domain.

His code sets cookies for the ".phpied.com", "phpied.com" and "www.phpied.com" domains. Since the domains without the "www" offer a bit broader range of possible matches, he recommends that if you're ever going to use any kind of subdomain, you'll want to use the more broad cookie to cover it.

David Goodwin has pointed out a new open source project that the PalePurple group are releasing - the Virtual Planning Board.

It's basically a piece of web-based software, written in Python and PHP, that allows you to allocate tickets from multiple Trac projects to a simple week-based 'board' in order to organise work priority for developers.

I've written about why we wanted this, and created a short user guide on the Trac site for the project. This is still in development and we're working on some more features (You can see what we've got planned from our timeline).

It's been released under the GPL and has a Subversion repository where you can grab the latest code from. There's also an installation guide that's been developed to help you get started.

On the CakeBaker blog, there's a note about a new job board they've started up specifically aimed at helping companies/other developers look for CakePHP experienced coders.

This week there was a discussion in the IRC channel about a missing job board for cake related jobs. Voila, here it is: findABaker. Feedback is as always welcome.

There's no postings on it yet, but I could definitely see this resource growing right along side the growth of CakePHP. If you'd like to make a posting, you can do so for free up until September 15th - then it's only $20 USD to post.

In a previous post on the Internet Storm Center website, they mentioned an issue that had come up with the Invision Board PHP/MySQL message board system by which a user clicking on a certian kind of link would push a .wmf exploit to the user.

More information about the exploit and the updates that the Invision Board team have made to counteract it can be found in this board pasting.

Unfortunately, there has also already been an incident with the exploit, causing the boards of "a large company" that was using it as a forum for its customers. Links started showing up that were causing problems, redirecting users to another server's page that pushed the bad .wmf file to them.

If you are running an Invision Board version before 2.1.6, it is stringly suggested you upgrade.

On DevShed today, they've posted this new tutorial continuing their "recursion in PHP" series - "Developing a Discussion Forum in PHP with Recursion".

Using what they've taught in the first two parts of the series, they put it to good use, giving you a step-by-step guide to a simple recursive forum. They start with the database structure (always a good thing) and work out from there, creating the "ThreadProcessor" class and fetch functionality to grab the thread's contents. They also include a bit of functionality to create threads as well. It's not much more than that, so don't expect too much, but it is a great place to start.

According to this post on his blog today, one of the board memebers from the Mambo project, Martin N Brampton is formally leaving his position.

He goes on to talk about some of the ongoing issues that the Board faced, including misinformation about trademark issues and their change to allow the membership of the Foundation to suggest rule changes.

For the complete story, check out this official release...