Philip Norton reminds you that the "Blind Bird" pricing for tickets to this year's PHP North West conference is almost coming to a close - the speaker list will be announced soon!

According to the PHPNW11 blog they had a 50% increase in paper submissions from PHPNW10, which means there will be an excellent range of talks on offer, but also a lot of papers to review before deciding on the schedule. So if you want to get in the bargain price of £75 for a fantastic two day conference then you had better get your tickets as soon as you can. After this week the early bird tickets will be released and the price will increase.

You can pick up both the Blind Bird and Tutorial day tickets right now from the ticket page of the PHPNW11 site.

If you're looking for a great conference to attend that's not just PHP specific (there's tracks for not just PHP but also Python, Java, Front-end development and Ruby) you should take a look at ConFoo happening March 9th through 11th in Montreal. The event brings together almost 150 different sessions into a packed three day event. They've just recently posted their schedule too.

PHP Québec, Montréal-Python, Montreal.rb, W3Qc and OWASP Montréal are proud to announce the second edition of the ConFoo Conference. From March 9th to 11th 2011, international experts in Java, .Net, PHP, Python and Ruby will present solutions for developers and project managers the prestigious Hilton Bonaventure Hotel, located in downtown Montréal.

If you want to get in on the Early Bird pricing, you'll need to act fast - it ends in three days (January 30th)! There's also an optional training event happening before the conference (March 7th & 8th) with three sessions on advanced PHP Development, Symfony2 and web standards.

Consider this your reminder - the Call for Papers for Italy's phpDay conference officially closes on January 31st, 2010! Don't forget to contribute your ideas!

The Italian phpDay Conference will be held this year on May 12th-14th, so if you are Italian or English speaker and you want have a session in an international PHP conference fill the form and send us your presentation. As a no profit organization we have not a big budget but we will refund speakers accommodation, meals and we'll give them from 200 to 300 Euro (it depends on the fund rising) as refund for travel expenses.

The event will be held May 12th through 14th in Verona at the San Marco Hotel. There's lots of different options for registration possible including the full conference pass, attendance to just the workshops, a single day pass and a pass to just the jsDay event.

Cal Evans is back with the latest part of his "Be a Better Client" series of posts focusing on how the person asking for the work to be done can interface with those doing the work more effectively. This time his recommendation is about deadlines.

Regardless of whether it is a large or small project, don't set one final deadline, set regular milestones. If it' a week-long project, figure out what will be delivered each day and set daily milestones. Larger projects will have them spaced out more but either way, make sure that you have them at regular intervals and that all major deliverables are assigned a milestone.

He points out that a single deadline only does one thing - lets the project know when to be done. It shows absolutely no progress along the way. Milestones are much more effective at this.

Make sure your developer is reporting back to you on a regular basis. At the very least you should have a status meeting at each milestone to make sure it was hit. For larger projects you will need meetings between the milestones to make sure the project stays on track.

As a reminder to all of those out there wanting to submit their presentation ideas for consideration in this year's PHP UK Conference 2011, the deadline is tonight!

The main attraction of any conference is the talks that are given and we aim to attract the best PHP speakers from around the world. We solicit talks through a call for papers so you, the community, can tell us what kinds of things everyone should be hearing about.

Be sure to get those submissions in before midnight GMT tonight or they won't be considered! To submit your ideas, go over to the Call for Papers form and fill in your information as well as the talk information including length, a summary and, if you want to help make your point, extra reasons why the submission should be accepted. The conference will be in London on Friday, February 25th.

Hurry and submit! Time's running out!

As is noted on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Call for Papers has been extended for this year's Zend/PHP Conference by another week. The deadline's now May 17th.

Due to comments on the originally short time-frame allowed for the CFP, we have extended the deadline to May 17th to allow a more reasonable time for submissions. We have also clarified the speaker expenses in the updated text below.

The post also gives a bit more detail than before on how the speakers are compensated for this year's event. If you'd like to submit your ideas, head to the submissions page and enter as many as you'd like!

The TEKX blog has a reminder for anyone wanting to submit proposals for the 2010 conference - today's the last day!

Today is the last day for our Call for Papers, which will close at midnight tonight. This means that you still have a few hours left to wow us with that killer proposal you've been swirling in your head for weeks. Remember, if it's a topic you think you would want to hear a presentation on, there's a fair chance that other developers will find it interesting, too.

You can submit your ideas into their automated system or, if you need some inspiration, take a look at last year's list for the normal conference and unconfernece.

As a reminder for those wanting to give a presentation at next year's PHP UK Conference (in February of 2010), the Call for Papers is only open until the end of October 31st (2009)!

The main focus of the conference is obviously the talks that are given, and so we hope to attract the best PHP speakers from around the world. [...] We are looking for talks relating to any non-basic aspect of the PHP programming language, be it mainstream, advanced, niche or non-technical. Speakers will be invited to the pre-conference dinner, likely to be on Thursday February 25th 2010 and the post-conference social dinner after the event.

You can submit your abstract via the form on this page or you can email the details to conference@phplondon.org.

The Zend Developer Zend has posted the announcement that the Call for Papers for this year's ZendCon - The PHP Conference has been opened.

Welcome to the Call for Papers for the 2009 edition of ZendCon '" The PHP Conference. This year's conference will be held October 19th '" 22nd at the San Jose Convention Center and is being co-presented by S&S Media. It is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and the premier PHP conference, allowing all attendees to mingle with decision makers, core developers, prominent community members, and so many more.

The scope of this year's conference has widened a bit and won't just be about PHP-related topics. Proposals for sessions about things like project lifecycle, frameworks, and performance tuning will also be accepted. There will be five different tracks this year:

• Server/Operations
• Lifecycle Best Practices
• Frameworks
• Real World PHP
• PHP Development Topics

The Call for Papers ends May 31st, so get over and submit your proposal before time runs out!

As a reminder from Ibuildings and Microsoft, time is running out for you to register for the 2009 WinPHP Challenge - the deadline is April 17th!

PHP is the language that runs the web, however, for a long time; PHP had a reputation of poor performance on Windows. Thanks to the hard work of the PHP Windows team and help from their friends in Redmond, Windows is now a first class citizen for PHP deployment as well as development. We asked two of the Core Windows PHP developers what they thought about the progress that PHP had made on Windows.

The contest is easy - make a brand new PHP application (not a port) build on a Windows and IIS7 setup. All needed licenses, software and hardware - each contestant gets their own Windows Server 2008 VPS to work on - that'll be used for the competition. Applications will be judged on originality, how complete they are, how/if they use Windows features and how well they're documented.

The contest will run from April 17th through May 31st to give you plenty of time to develop your application. You can find out more about the contest and register on this page off the Dutch PHP Conference wiki (the registration link is up there near the top).