On PHPMaster.com there's a new post from Aurelio De Rosa sharing some of his experiences at this year's phpDay conference.

Conferences play an important role in the process of becoming a better developer. When you attend a conference, you not only have the chance to listen to language or technology experts, but also the chance to meet other developers. This is ideal for expanding your networks of contacts to find, if needed, your next job. Last week I attended the phpDay 2013 conference in Verona and the following are some of the highlights of the talks I attended and what I learned.

The post talks about the two-day conference including details on some of the sessions covering things like PHP 5.5, dependency management with Composer, DevOps and high performance PHP.

The latest Release Candidates in the PHP 5.3.x and 5.4.x series and are available for download and testing - PHP 5.3.18RC1 and PHP 5.4.8RC1:

We've released PHP 5.3.18RC1 and 5.4.8RC1. This is a regular bugfix release, the full list of issues fixed can be found in the NEWS files. Please test and report if anything is broken. If no critical issues is found in this RC, the final version will be released in two weeks.

Bugs fixed in this release include issues with is_callable, the catching of an exception in an __autoload call, fixes for the SOAP an dSPL extensions as well as updates to the CLI server (501 response, PATCH support) and changes to the DOM, FPM and cURL extensions. You can download these latest Candidates and get testing here:

5.3.18RC1:

• http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.18RC1.tar.bz2
• http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.18RC1.tar.gz

5.4.8RC1:

• http://downloads.php.net/stas/php-5.4.8RC1.tar.bz2
• http://downloads.php.net/stas/php-5.4.8RC1.tar.gz

Windows binaries for both as always are at: http://windows.php.net/qa/

If you're a fan of open source development and can't get enough about projects and what's the latest in the online OS community as a whole, you'll definitely enjoy The Changelog (it's a weekly podcast and news site).

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

The latest version of PHP in the 5.4.0 release candidate series has been posted - PHP 5.4.0 RC4, complete with new features and lots of bugfixes.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the 4th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! This is the 4th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0.

Updates in this release candidate include an update to the max_input_vars directive and a fix for a segfault in the traits code. You can find the full notes for the release in the NEWS file and can download the latest from the PHP.net site - source downloads, Windows binaries.

If you're a regular reader of PHPDeveloper.org, you know that there's a few articles posted here (almost) daily about what's happening in the PHP world. Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the quality content that's out there. In an effort to provide more PHP goodness to the community as a whole, PHP Quick Fix has been launched - a service linking to stories that don't make it on PHPDeveloper.org.

All of the stories on PHP Quick Fix (you can also follow it on twitter) are still hand-selected out of the mounds of PHP content that shows every day to ensure the best quality. There's no automatic syndication here - just more good, useful PHP (and related topics) to add to your day.

Additionally, if you're interested to see how it all works (thanks to a GimmeBar backend) check out this post on blog.phpdeveloper.org.

The crew over at SitePoint have introduced a new PHP-specific resource that's looking to provide a good resource for those looking for community info and tutorials - PHPMaster.com.

PHPMaster is the latest and greatest in the SitePoint family, dedicated to bringing you the highest quality in tutorials from some of the web's best PHP Developers, as well as news and information on events in the PHP Community.

Tutorials posted so far include:

• Migrate from the MySQL Extension to PDO
• Monitoring File Integrity
• From Zero to Cloud: Settings up an EC2 Sandbox - part one, part two
• Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords

The PHP development group has officially released the alpha3 of PHP 5.4 as ready for testing. Rasmus Lerdorf comments:

PHP 5.4 alpha3 is available for testing now. Please give us a hand and compile it on your platform and run a "make test". Download it from http://qa.php.net and you can see the changes in the NEWS file at http://t.co/bBVGj8P

Updates in this alpha include the shortened array syntax, binary numbers format, support for the "Class::{expr}()" syntax, removal of magic quotes related features, a change to include E_STRICT in E_ALL and several others. Head over to the PHP QA site and download this latest version to test in your environment. Remember, environments are unique, so the more test results the better - it helps make for a better quality end result.

If you've been feeling a bit out of the loop about the upcoming PHP conferences worldwide, you should take a look at this new summary post from the ServerGrove blog. It looks at the latest for five different conferences.

Every a few months we publish a post regarding news about PHP conferences. In the last few years the number of conferences being held around the globe has increased dramatically. 2011 spawned a few days ago but we felt it was time to do one of those articles due to the number of conferences being held right at the start of the new year. Here is a quick list of conferences that are coming up and that you should seriously consider attending if you are close or can travel.

They mention the latest from PHP Benelux, Symfony Live (US), Symfony Live (Paris), PHP UK and Confoo.

If you're a PHP developer and you're in or near Serbia, you should check out a new site put up by Robert Basic specifically for developers in that area - PHPLaneta.net.

It's idea is to be a community website for PHP programmers from Serbia and other countries from the region. The idea for this website "hit" me somewhere in April or May I think, while I was lurking the interwebs for some, any PHP communities in the region, user groups, anything really, where local PHP programmers could share ideas, news, interests, etc., but found nothing (well, besides 2 bulletin boards and a few of us on Twitter). So, I decided to try and create one.

There's some good content in there already, so if you're in the area (or really anywhere for that matter) and want to keep up with some of the latest PHP-related news from a Serbian's perspective, check out PHPPlaneta.net.

On the Ibuildings techPortal blog today there's a new article (a case study of sorts) on how to survive a plane crash. More specifically, a look at how the NU.nl news website handled the load as a result of the crash of a Turkish Airliner.

On February 25th, 2009, less than 90 days after the new infrastructure was rolled out, it was stress tested when a Turkish Airliner crashed at Schiphol. On that day the new site set a single day traffic record by serving up 21 million page views in a 24 hour time period, all without any noticeable slowdown and without having to bring additional hardware online to handle the additional load.

Their framework of choice, CodeIgniter, allowed then to create snippets of content - cached versions - that could be pulled and displayed without having to render them every single time. They looked into the Varnish project and a ATK-based CMS to piece it all back together.