For those that couldn't attend this year's Whiskey Web conference and were wondering what it was like, you should check out this new summary from Marco De Bortoli on the Ibuildings techPortal.

Whisky Web is a brand new, fresh conference and the 2012 edition was the inaugural event, with hopefully many more to follow. This event has some familiar names from the PHP community behind it, Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas and his helpers Michael Maclean, Max Manders, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis.

He talks about several of the sessions including the keynotes from Josh Holmes and David Zuelke and other sessions covering things like estimation, Node.js, the rush into new technologies, testing legacy code and running applications in "the cloud".

If you've been looking for the "quick and dirty" definition of all of the changes that come with the latest version of PHP 5.4, you should check out this new post from Sameer Borate. It has a quick rundown, code included, of these new features and changes.

Although purists have always sneered upon PHP for being a "patched" language; the evolution of PHP over the years, with new features added in every version, has only increased its popularity. The latest 5.4 release has followed the trend with some major feature additions. The following post describes some important changes in PHP 5.4.

His list includes: the updated array syntax, the bulit-in web server, array dereferencing, traits, upload progress tracking and various core changes to things like the short syntax for calling static methods in classes and the complete remval of magic quotes.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a year in review post (from Ben Longden, Rowan Merewood and Alistair Stead) looking back at 2011 and everything that happened in the world of PHP.

2011 has flown by in a blur as we have been busy helping many new clients with large scale PHP projects - proof that PHP continues to gain traction with enterprise. [...] The ongoing financial climate only adds pressure for IT managers to cut costs and deliver more value from their existing infrastructure and therefore require enterprises to re-consider any prior aversion to open source and PHP. This is allowing our industry to consistently buck the trend of the markets and expand to support the increased demand.

They list some of the changes in PHP itself, like the Release Candidates for PHP 5.4 and the 5.3 requirements of some frameworks, as well as some community-related changes: Facebook's Virtual PHP Machine (hhvm) and the number of PHP-related events in Europe and the UK. They mention some projects that become more prominent in 2011 including BDD testing, Platform as a Service products and the EBay acquisition of Magento.

Also included in the post are a few predictions for 2012 including a possible merging of frameworks along similar strategies, the increased use of dependency injection containers and a serious look into caching in PHP applications.

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has written up a summary of the eastern leg of the CodeWorks conference tour that just wrapped up in Orlando, Florida.

While it will still be a few days weeks until I'm finally recovered, I wanted to share a recap of CodeWorks East 2011 while it was still fresh. If you're looking for the core presenters' slides, attendees will receive them via email but they will not be published publicly until after the West Coast Tour is complete in January 2012.

He mentions their sponsor first (Adobe) and then gets into the details of each stop along their way - Madison, Nashville, Baltimore, Raleigh and finally Orlando. Their west coast tour kicks off on January 10th in Seattle (with further stops in Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin). You can find out more about the event on the CodeWorks site.

In a new post to his blog Volker Dusch points out a new feature in a recent release of PHPUnit, the popular unit testing framework for PHP - textual code coverage details.

Three weeks ago PHPUnit 3.6 was released and it has a little new feature you might have missed until now. PHPUnit can now show you code coverage information on the command line.

Options for the report output include: colorizing, writing the output to a file, including a project summary, namespace separation and package (using the @package phpdoc tag) information. He includes a use case he's found for it - small projects where you can cover the whole codebase quickly (with a "watch" command example filtering based on a certain class).

On the Ibuildings techPortal Marco De Bortoli has posted the second part of his summary of this year's PHP North West conference (you can find the first part here). In this part he briefly discusses the tutorial day and the main conference, including the sessions he attended.

This was a very social event from day one, warm and funny with a horde of geeks trying to mix with "normal people" (yes, that can happen if you attend the PHPNW conference, so try not to miss it next year). The best thing about PHP conferences is knowledge-sharing; you won't leave without a hundred different thoughts and ideas of how to do things better. Once again - definitely a good time, both personally and professionally. If you weren't there, you missed out!

The sessions he specifically mentions include the "Security" talk from Arne Blankerts, "Maintainable Applications in PHP Using Components" by Stuart Herbert, "PHP Extensions, why and what?" by Derick Rethans and "Acceptance & Integration Testing Using Behat" from Ben Waine.

On PHPBuilder.com today, Jason Gilmore has posted a look at five PHP-based ecommerce solutions with a wide range of feature sets and larger support and usage across the web.

Literally hundreds of open source and commercial PHP-based ecommerce solutions exist, yet only a select few will adequately meet the aforementioned requirements. If you're currently exploring a PHP-based ecommerce project, consider starting your investigations by learning more about these five prominent solutions.

The five that made the list were:

• Magento
• LemonStand
• osCommerce
• PrestaShop
• UberCart

For each he gives a brief overview of what it has to offer and includes links to the official demo for you to try it out before making your decision.

Padraic Brady has posted the first in a new series of articles to his blog talking about the most recent happenings on the Zend Framework Contributors mailing list.

What's this nonsense then? Well, a few weeks ago I shot myself in the foot [...] and before my sanity returned to normal, I found myself hoodwinked on IRC into writing up weekly summaries of what is discussed in Zend Framework land.

The posts will try to bring together some of the major topics from the last week on the list. This week's features include the "where do things go?" question about files/resources, how to package up a Zend Framework 2 application, the View component in ZF2 and a few other topics. If you'd like to keep up with these weekly posts, you can follow along on the php-general tag on Padraic's blog.

On the Ibuildings techPortal blog today Ed van Beinum has posted a summary of the first day of this year's Dutch PHP Conference including some of his experiences and mentions of the sessions he attended.

He talks about the keynote from Aral Balkan (a clear favorite among the attendees) and some of the choices he had to make for sessions. He ended up attending a talk on Solr, Zend Framework on the command line, automated deployment, CouchDb applications and the Zend Framework 2.

Keep an eye out for more to come - the event was three days! You can find other summaries and retrospectives on the rest of the techPortal.

On the Ibuildings blog today Hilary Boyce has posted her wrapup of the Dutch PHP Conference that just recently came to a close in Amsterdam.

I have just returned from the fifth (and my second) Dutch PHP Conference (DPC). For the technical staff at Ibuildings the conference is a highlight of our year. Not only do we have a chance to visit the delightful city of Amsterdam, but we also have 3 days of stimulating tutorials and conference talks. There is the added bonus of being able to meet and exchange ideas with fellow developers from all over Europe and further afield, many of whom are the movers and shakers in the PHP world.

She talks about the value of the conference, the advancement of knowledge it provided and the the shift in focus that's been the trend lately - less focus on the language and more on the professional development processes. She mentions specific talks such as Aral Balkan's keynote and a presentation on web services and the important role they play in application design. Other popular topics at this year's DPC were best practices in development, agile and internationalization and character sets.