Zend has officially announced that they will be presenting a "sister" conference to the one they already hold each year in California, this time in Europe - ZendCon Europe.

ZendCon PHP 2013 will be the place where European PHP professionals gather this fall. [...] Attend Europe's largest conference focusing on Enterprise PHP solutions, Frameworks, PHP Training and all things PHP. Meet the legends who created PHP and are partly responsible for what the WWW looks like today. Whether you wish to find a job, take PHP training, find a services company to help you, or just meet the greatest developer ecosystem ever -You are in the right place!

The event will be held in Paris, France on November 18th through the 20th at the Marriott Rive Gauche. Following the same pattern as the US version of the conference, the first day will be tutorials with regular sessions the following days. It's still pretty early on so there's no details about the Call for Papers or anything yet, but you can sign up for more information on the current conference site.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their November meeting - Brian Moon talking about "The Magical World of Gearman":

Gearman is a simple and robust tool for distributing asynchronous or offline work across a large number of worker boxes. Gearman will let you run a simple asynchronous task in only a few lines of code (and in many languages). This talk will focus on what Gearman is, some use cases for it, and how you can quickly start using it with PHP.

The meeting is being held at Thompson Technologies Thursday, November 1st from 7-9pm. A mini-talk from Scott Lively about PHP_CodeSniffer will also be given.

Have an upcoming user group meeting you'd like announced? let us know!

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's the announcement of their latest Bug Hunt Day for the Zend Framework happening the 18th through the 20th of November (this Thursday through Saturday).

For those who haven't put the reoccurring event in their calendar, this announcement is for you: Zend Framework Monthly Bug-hunt is here again! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday of November (the 18th, 19th and 20th 2010), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework.

This bug hunt is a particularly important one since they've released the final release branch for the 1.x series. They want things to be "rock solid" and are encouraging even more testers to come and help out. To help out, you'll need a CLA on file and you can read their guide on how to get started.

Daniel Cousineau has written up some timely advice in a new post to his blog. It looks at pinpointing the time boundary for Daylight Savings Time in a PHP script (when it starts and when it ends).

I had an issue recently where I needed to calculate the Unix timestamp for the daylight savings time boundaries. According to the United States Naval Observatory, daylight savings time begins the Second Sunday of March and ends on the First Sunday of November.

He looks at using the strtotime function to calculate these dates but points out some quirks - like what happens when you just give it a month or something like "second Sunday". His solution was to go back one day ("March 0" instead of "March 1") and calculating the time from there, including that first full day of March in the calculation.

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.

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.

Lorna Mitchell has announce this year's PHP North West Conference happening at Manchester Central on November 22nd.

[The] early bird ticket price of £50 and t the moment we have no website, no confirmed speakers, and no other information to release ... but rest assured there are lots of plans being worked on behind the scenes!

Whe the site is completed, it'll be up at phpnw.org.uk, but for those that want to keep track of the progress of the conference, you can use that site to sign up for the mailing list right now.

Damien Seguy has posted this month's PHP statistics (for November 2007):

Here are the monthly highlight :

• PHP 5 still vigorous, up to 26%
• PHP 4.4.7 is the last growing PHP 4 version
• PHP 5.2 will take over PHP 4.3 in the next months

You can check out the full stats here as well as the evolution stats here.

Kore Nordmann has a quick post about the progress of his and Tobias Schlitt's German eZ Components book:

Tobys and my book about eZ Components, published by Galileo Computing, has passed the second gelley-proof and will be published very soon. As Toby blogged earlier we invested quite some work into this project, and somehow I feel sorry for the time not invested in other projects, but once we will have the finished book in our hands, and not just the gelley-proof PDF, I am sure, that the work will prove as worth the effort.

According to the Amazon.de information the book will be published in November and will come in at around 350 pages. Their price is just a bit under 35 Euro.

php|architect has posted their November and December training class schedule online today that includes all of their courses:

• PHP Essentials
• PHP Certification Combo
• Professional PHP
• Building Rich Internet Applications With PHP 5 and AJAX

Classes start at around $770 USD and, as an extra incentive, their iPod Touch promotion is still going on. Order any training class and get a free iPod Touch delivered right to your door. Only training purchased between September 18th and November 30th of 2007 are eligible, so be sure to get your order in in time!