php|architect, the group behind the yearly php|tek conference has posted this year's official schedule. Sessions in this year's event include:

• Developer Testing 201, When to Mock and When to Integrate (Laura Beth Denker)
• API Development (Rob Richards)
• The MicroPHP Manifesto (Ed Finkler)
• Web Security and You (Elliot White)
• Decoupled Library Packages for PHP 5.4
• Clojure for PHP Developers (Ian Barber)

Tickets are now on sale - you can find out more on the sales page for the event.

The FrOSCon event is a yearly conference held at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Germany. This year's event is being held August 20th and 21st and they've just released the schedule for this year's event.

Included in the list of sessions are topics like:

• Mailing list project management
• Openstack deployment
• Behavior-driven development
• Using git for version control
• MySQL performance tuning
• Using Ant for application build and deployment
• Best practices for creating high load websites
• Test=driven development

You can see the complete list of the topics and speakers here as well as information on other events, iCalendar links for reminders and an XML of the sessions.

As posted on the PHPNW conference's blog, they've announced the schedule for this year's event and have posted it to the site.

You can now find the schedule for the PHP North West Conference 2011. We hope you like it as much as we do. The speakers have been selected via Call for Papers and hope that you share our excitement by this year's fantastic lineup! Thank you to everyone who submitted.

Topics included in this year's event are things like deployment with phing, Symfony2, DocBlox, Doctrine2, Git and various development processes types of talks. For more information about this great conference or to purchase your tickets, head over to the main conference site.

On the Symfony blog today there's some new updates about their upcoming SymfonyLive events posted - both for the San Francisco and Paris conferences.

I've already posted about the Symfony Live Conferences schedule a few weeks ago, but since then, we have added quite a few sessions from top-notch speakers.

San Francisco will be getting a talk from Dustin Whittle (a Symfony core team member) as well as Kris Wallsmith speaking about Assetic (an asset management library for PHP 5.3). Those attending the Paris conference will be happy to know that Weka Entertainment, the developers of a major Facebook game, will be on hand to talk about how they migrated everything to Symfony in less than three months.

You can find out more about these conferences on the Symfony Live website.

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.

The php|architect crew have officially posted the schedule for this year's tek11 conference happening May 24th through 27th in Chicago. On the topic list this year are things like:

• design patterns
• Zend Framework optimization
• cross-platform development with Titanium
• unit testing
• Node.js
• Javascript frameoworks

Register now and reserve your spot today!

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a reminder about PHPBelenux - the conference is coming soon, so be sure to get your tickets now!

The second annual PHPBenelux Conference is taking place on January 28 and 29 at the same location as last year: Hotel Ter Elst in Edegem (Antwerp, Belgium). We were able to secure an awesome schedule with three tracks, 1.5 days of conference and a tutorial morning. The schedule has been announced for most part of it and also the ticket sales are well underway.

They've included the schedule for this year's event in the post too. There's a wide range of topics this year including:

• MySQL preformance tuning
• Geolocation
• Zeta components
• mobile development with PHP
• Doctrine
• PHP's namespace support
• caching with Varnish

If you haven't picked up your ticket yet, there's still some left. Head over to the PHPBenelux online order form and get yours today!

On the Symfony blog today there's a new post of schedules for the upcoming Symfony Live events happening in San Francisco and Paris.

First of all, I wish you a very happy new year! I wish you the best and I hope 2011 will be a big year for symfony and Symfony2. 2011 is getting off to a great start with the Symfony Live conferences. As you might have noticed, we have unveiled the schedule for the Symfony Live conference in Paris and San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.

Speakers and topics featured in San Francisco include Tom Boutell on Apostrophe, a real world session on Symfony2 and Scott Chacon's talk on git. In Paris you can see Josh Holmes talk about simplicity, Thomas Rabaix on Solr and more about the "big plans" Lukas Smith and others are making about Symfony2 and CMSs.

Lorna Mitchell has posted her second part of her "tips for [tech] event hosting" series (first part here) with some suggestions for the day of the event - those last minute things that might get forgotten.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. [...] As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well.

She makes suggestions about the little things - ensuring name badges are ready, a posted schedule of the happenings at the event (not every event will have programs), check in on all of the tech like projectors, wifi and the like as well as keeping track of things like hashtags on twitter to see what people like and don't like more immediately.

On SitePoint.com there's a new tutorial posted in their "PHP & MySQL tutorials" section about using a feature of WordPress that some might not know about but can be extremely handy when you need it - using WordPress tasks.

Scheduling the execution of certain functions at a time in the future is a key feature of the WordPress API, having been introduced in WordPress version 2.0. It's also a topic that's poorly understood by many developers, as it's only briefly covered in WordPress's documentation. Apart from facilitating maintenance tasks, scheduling code to be executed in the future opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for plugin developers.

He talks a bit about how the WordPress tasks work (via the wp-cron.php script) and the two types of tasks - one-off and recurring. He includes code and examples of how to set up each and some other handy features like custom timing for tasks, getting the list of scheduled tasks and a few things to watch out for when working with the feature.