The Dutch PHP Conference has officially opened their Call for Papers for this year's event (happening in early June):

We're back! And we are glad to announce that we'll be organising another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, which will be held in Amsterdam from 6th to 8th June 2013.

Submissions should be relevant to PHP developers, to help them to expand their skill set and improve their practices. In particular we'd like to receive proposals regarding emerging technologies, performance and scalability, platforms and best practices. The standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes and tutorials are 3 or 6 hours in length (note that 6 hours is our preference).

As always we're excited about all kinds of different topics. You could say that as long as it's somehow related to PHP and you're really excited about it, we want to hear it!

You can find out more about the conference in general from the main conference site.

The PHPBenelux conference has officially announced the opening of the Call for Papers for their 2013 event (happening January 25th and 26th):

fter three successful conferences earlier this year and last year, the PHPBenelux team is proud to announce the 4th edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. Like last year, the conference will last two full days, starting with a half day tutorial followed by 1.5 days of conference. The conference is on Friday 25th January and Saturday 26th January 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium. Become part of this year's speaker schedule at the PHPBenelux Conference 2013. Each chosen speaker receives a speaker package!

There's two types of sessions - the 60 minute regular sessions and 3 hour tutorials. Suggested topics include "Content Management Systems", "Frameworks", "Best Practices" and "HTML5". The Call for Papers is only open until October 1st so be sure to submit your ideas today!

Anna Filina has posted a reminder for all of those that wanted to put their hat into the ring for this year's ConFoo conference - the Call for Papers is now open!

The ConFoo team just opened its call for papers. Candidates can submit proposals until September 23. Consult the call for papers page for details and to start submitting. That page also explains what expenses ConFoo can cover for speakers. You can even get advice on how to write proposals. The call for papers is public, meaning that all proposals get published on the website for others to vote and comment on.

This year's event is happening from February 25th through March 1st in Montreal, Canada with tracks covering things like .NET development, Project Management, Web Standards, DevOps and, of course, PHP. The Call for Papers closes on September 23rd so you have less than a month to get your proposals in!

In this new post to his blog Anthony Ferrara responds to some of the recent news about PHP standards being up for voting (PSR-1 and PSR-2). He has an issue with how they were created, though, and notes that the current PSR process doesn't encourage open standards.

There has been a lot of traction lately on the topic of the PSR "PHP Framework Interoperability Group". They are introducing two new proposed standards: PSR-1and PSR-2, both dealing with code formatting standards. [...] I have read both, and actually agree and think they are quite good. However, there's a deeper problem. Open Standards is something that the internet was built upon. From HTTP, E-Mail and HTML to ECMA Script (JavaScript), OAuth and JSON, open standards are everywhere. The problem with the entire PSR process is that it is not designed to produce open standards.

He describes an "open standard" and points to this RFC as an example of the open process they should result from. He talks about the importance of the process and how having more people reviewing and contributing their ideas could help find issues in the proposal. He issues a "call to the PSR team" to adopt this practice, allowing a more open flow to the ideas that are being proposed.

Note that I'm not asking to open the vote to anyone else. I'm not saying that standards should be approved by everyone in the community. There should still be a standards body that makes the final decision. But they should make that decision based on community input. They should actively look for and encourage open discussion prior to voting.

Freek Lijten has posted the second part of his series looking at the SOLID development methodology. In this latest post his looks at the second letter in the acronym - "O" for "Open Closed Principle."

Software that requires an enormous amount of changes to implement one new feature or fix a bug is unstable and should be considered as "bad". Software should be designed so, that in case of a new feature, no existing classes should have to change. In other words: it is closed for modification. Existing software may be extended to achieve new features however.

He starts off with a "What" section explaining a bit more about what this open/closed means for your code and gets into an example showing it in a more practical way. He shows how to take the principle and refactor an API connector class to pass in the object it needs (Bike) and use that to get information (rather than just passing in the data). He uses a Factory to get the object type he needs based on the Bike type.

In a response to a recent post on DZone.com about the "Open/Closed Principle" Josh Adell has posted an example of a " flexible and extendable command invocation solution" implementing this SOLID idea.

Let's overcome some of these issues [with only being able to extend the invoker class and that the invoker needs to know how to create commands], and also make the code even more extensible. I'll use a simplified command invoker to demonstrate.

His code is included - the creation of a "Command" interface and two comments that implement it: "HelloCommand" and "PwdCommand", each with "register" and "execute" methods. His "Invoker" class then only needs to be told how to map these commands and the "register" is called as they're needed. You can find the full example code for this invocation example in this gist.

In a new post to DZone.com Giorgio Sironi talks about the "open/closed principle" in software development and shows an example based on the design of the PHPUnit_Selenium project.

This article shows an example of how the application of the Open/Closed Principle improved the design of a real project, the open source library PHPUnit_Selenium. These design concepts apply to every object-oriented language, including Java, Ruby or even C++. The Open Closed Principle, part of SOLID set, states that software should be open for extension and at the same time closed for modification.

He starts with a little background on the project, pointing out that there's a Session object it uses for all of its testing with a magic "__call" method that handles any kind of method call to the object. This method has issues (dependencies, strict requirements for use) but can be refactored according to the Open/Closed idea to set up an array of anonymous functions that can be called as a "command". Examples of these types of classes are also included (one for the "click" action on a button and another for getting the current location).

Anna Filina, one of the organizers of the ConFoo Conference in Montreal (February 27th through March 2nd) has a new post to her blog about a new process they're trying out this year for the Call for Papers - a public voting feature that allows anyone to voice their opinion on the proposed sessions.

Some of you may have already heard that the ConFoo call for papers is already open. The great thing about it this year, is that it's public. This means that anyone can vote on the proposals. Besides being fun for the speakers and attendees, it opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

She talks about some of the reasons they decided to go this route such as wanting to give the attendees the most "bang for the buck" and the ability for speakers to see what their fellow speakers are proposing and is working. The committee, of course, will have the final say, but the votes will help quite a bit.

If you'd like to vote and are even considering making it to this year's event, go over an sign up to vote on the conference's Call for Papers section.

As was mentioned by Zend late yesterday, the registration for this year's Zend/PHP Conference have officially opened!

The 7th Annual Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will take place October 17-20, 2011, In Santa Clara, California. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and brings together PHP developers and IT managers from around the world to discuss PHP best practices and explore new technologies.

The Early Bird pricing will last until September 10th saving you about $200 USD off the price of the ticket. The full ZendCon experience (Tutorials & Conference) is $1,195 USD or you can opt for just the Tutorial for $445 USD or just the Conference for $945 USD. You're in luck if you're looking for discounts, though - they have lots o them including ones for ZendCon alumni, group discounts, ZCEs and students.

The schedule's not quite out yet, but as you can see by some of the comments from speakers on Twitter, it's shaping up to be a great schedule. Topics like CouchDb, component architecture, design patterns, Redis and dependency injection will all be there.

Freek Lijten has a recent post looking at some of the types of discussions that happen on the php-internals mailing list.

The internals list is the place to be to hear about the current state of PHP. It is one of PHP's many mailing lists, but this is the one where (core) developers discuss new features, current bugs and wild ideas. If you want to keep up with things it is a good idea to sign up, it is not an extremely high volume list and if you ignore the noise it is quite informative. In this article I would like to share examples of stuff typically discussed on the list.

He mentions feature requests in general and, more specifically things like traits support (multiple inheritance), array dereferencing, callable arrays and the debate over the short array syntax.