Mirroring the move they made previously to move the Yahoo! Bookmarks service over to Symfony, the company has updating their Yahoo! Answers service to be the same. According to the symfony blog today:

Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

The post shares some of the thoughts behind the move including their philosophy, the design of the project and a link to a presentation given on the update.

As Ivo Jansch mentions, the speaker list for this year's Dutch PHP conference has been finalized:

Based on feedback from the 'call for ideas' we have added a session on security. It will be presented by Johann-Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower. Also, we are happy to announce that Terry Chay, a well-known blogger in the PHP community and informally called the 'PHP terrorist', will deliver the closing keynote.

You can check out the rest of the presentations (5 tutorials and 12 sessions) on the conference's schedule page and, if you haven't already yet, you can still register to reserve your spot to enjoy this great event (talks only, tutorials are sold out).

Cal Evans (of the Zend Developer Zone) has written up a summary of an event he recently attend and spoke at in the Netherlands - the PHP Business Seminar.

I've just returned from my second trip to the Netherlands and, as with the first one, I had a wonderful time. This time, I was honored to speak at the PHP Business Seminar put on as a joint project by IBuildings and Sogeti.

He talks about the conference, some of the presentations (a bit of which he caught, they were all in Dutch) and his experience presenting - twice, once with Red Bull and once without. If you want a bit more detail (and the slides from his talk) check out Cal's post on his personal blog too.

The PHP London Conference group has posted three more mp3s of presentations given at this year's conference - one from Scott MacVicar, another from Zoe Slattery and the last from Anthony Phillips:

• Scott MacVicar talking about Sqlite3, explaining what it is and how it's best applied with PHP. [mp3] [pdf]
• Zoe Slattery talking about testing PHP itself and how you can write tests to help improve PHP in the future. [mp3] [pdf]
• Anthony Phillips talking about IBM's Project Zero, how it can give your existing code a new lease of life in a REST context amongst other subjects. [mp3] [pdf]

Check out the conference's site for other great speakers and their sessions (with mp3s and pdfs).

Lukas Smith, originator of the emPHPower idea (a network of like-minded PHPers looking to further the language's presence in the online world), is asking for a little help with getting the project mentioned somewhere at this year's OSCON 2008.

Now the key thing is to have someone there to spearhead the thing. I cannot afford to go unless some sponsor steps up and fly's me down there and points towards a bridge to sleep under and manages to squeeze me by the guards at the door. So maybe someone else is interested in bringing up this topic at OSCON to collect some feedback, ideas and comments. Any takers?

If you're willing and want to check out more about the community effort, head over to their web page and get all the details.

In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. [...] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).

On the PHP London conference website (from the recently passed PHP London 2008) has posted the first of many mp3s of the session that happened there. This first one comes from Ivo Jansch.

His presentation is titled Enterprise PHP Development and looks at things like whether or not PHP is "enterprise ready", how PHP's role in the online world has changed and some steps to take to be sure your application is ready to serve your enterprise.

The slides can be found here and the mp3 of the presentation is here.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the slides from two presentations that Wil Sinclair (of the Zend Framework team) has given at two different conferences lately - SD West and a San Francisco Meetup.

Wil Sinclair has been a busy man of late. In addition to getting ready for the 1.5 release of Zend Framework and recording a podcast with me, he has taken the time to present 2 different presentations on Zend Framework.

The presentation from SD West was titled Web 2.0: Building Rich Internet Applications with PHP and the one presented to the Meetup group, Zend Framework 1.5 Latest Features

Felix Geisendorfer has posted his slides from his presentation at this year's CakeFest covering the powerful combination of jQuery and the CakePHP framework.

Sorry this took so long, but here you can download the PDF or the much better Keynote version of my slides.

He also has an embedded Slideshare player on the post of you want to check out the presentation without the download.

Hasin Hayder shares a method for "hacking" the Slideshare.net service to be able to download whatever slideshow you'd like:

I just spent some time today analyzing the HTTP requests made by the player available in slideshare using LiveHTTPHeader extension and found a way to download any presentation you want! There are many slides available in slideshare where you see that "Download not available" - But as long you have some knowledge on web-scrapping, that doesn’t matter at all.

He includes the code that you can point at a slideshow's URL and let run. It works through each of the pages of the presentation and pulls out the URL of it and echoes it back out.