Derick Rethans (master of all things date and time in PHP) has a new post to his blog showing how to correctly get the "next month" since the date string parser doesn't understand how to use that string directly.

Over and over again PHP users complain that next month in PHP's date-string parser doesn't go to the next month, but instead skips to the one after next month.

He describes what happens internally, how PHP bumps up the month and counts the number of days, and how you can use some of newer features in the PHP 5.3 release to get the first day of the next month. Specifically, this means using the "first day of next month" string for the modify() call on the DateTime object. If you're not on PHP 5.3 yet, Derick also includes a method in the comments to do it a slightly different way.

Eli White has posted a first day summary of this year's php|tek conference's Tutorial Day (Day 0) to the Zend Developer Zone:

The first day at PHP|tek this year is traditionally the Tutorial Day, and this year was no exception. Of course, one almost needs to discuss Day 0 as well. The monday before the conference where everyone is arriving and preparing. Day 0, is basically a family reunion at PHP|tek, which is known for being the 'Community' conference. Hanging out in the lobby, you will see numerous hugs and enthusiastic greetings happening. (As well as a few drinks being bought and shared)

He mentions tutorials given by Ed Finkler and an SVN tutorial from Lorna Mitchell and Matthew Weier O'Phinney. These were just two of many - other included a code review session, an in-depth look at caching in PHP apps and application security. Stay tuned to the Zend Developer Zone for more updates to come.

As a reminder, today is the last day to get in talk proposals for next year's php|tek conference:

Today is the last day of the Call for Papers for our upcoming php|tek 2009 conference, which will take place in Chicago between May 19 and 22nd. Don't forget to send in your proposals before it's too late!

You can get more information about submitting a talk from this page on the conference website as well as where to send the proposals and what kind of speaker compensation package they have to offer.

As this new post on the symfony blog points out, their next Plugin Developers Day is happening this weekend on Saturday, November 8th.

Preparations for the coming plugin developers day on Nov. 8th are proceeding apace. I've heard from a number of you who are planning to attend, some planning to start development on new, groudbreaking plugins, others looking to help update existing plugins to work with the latest and greatest version of symfony, and still others just hoping to learn from the lively discussion. All types are welcome!

The event will be centered around the #symfony channel on the Freenode IRC network and is broken up into different sections - creating and releasing a plugin, writing a customizable plugin and coding sprints on new/existing plugins.

Kris Wallsmith has posted an announcement to the symfony blog about an upcoming event (happening Saturday November 8th from 3pm-9pm GMT) - Plugin Developers Day.

We will cover a number of plugin-related subjects in depth, including creating and naming a plugin, adding customizable model, form and action classes, unit and functional testing a plugin, packaging and releasing, and what's new in symfony 1.2.

If you've been meaning to try your hand at writing a symfony plugin or have been writing plugins for years, please join some of your fellow developers for a day of learning, collaboration and development.

Its an online event that'll be happening in the #symfony IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network. Nothing to sign up for - just show up ready to learn.

Chuck Burgess has a quick post pointing out the next "PEAR triage days":

PEAR's next Bug Triage days are this weekend: Saturday 4 PM - 9 PM UTC and Sunday 4 PM - 10 PM UTC.

You can find the schedule and more information about joining in at this page on the PEAR wiki. You can find others working on the triage on the EFNet's IRC network in the #pear-bugs channel.

A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).

After having some issues with spam comments over on his blog, Ryan Malesevich decided to do something about it. So, being the WordPress fan that he is, he implemented a new plugin to help things a bit - removing the ability to comment on a post older than 21 days.

I'm using a plugin called Auto-Close Comments. Whenever you write a post, edit a post, or anything similar to that, it will go through the database and close any comments for posts older than three weeks. I'm going to try it out for a while to see how my spam comments are altered.

You need to install it manually since there's no official packaged plugin for it, but it's a pretty simple matter of cut & paste to get it working. Then, you just define the number of days that you want the cutoff to be and you're all set.

Derick Rethans has posted a quick tip to his blog today:

A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.

The (technically) three-line code uses ISO format for the date to tell you which day is the starting day of that week and which is the end. He only explains this format just a bit, so if you want more information, check out the strtotime function page.