In this recent post to his blog Ian Barber offers up some hints on presenting at conferences (or other events really) based on some of his experiences at this year's PHP Benelux Conference that just wrapped up in Belgium.

Some of the conversations I had during the weekend were around technical presenting at conferences and usergroups, so I thought I'd collect a handful of the tips that were discussed into a post, and use a few of my favourite speakers at the event to illustrate them.

He has it broken up by speaker, first David Zülke, Rowan Merewood and David Coallier, each with their own highlights of what they did well in their presentations. The list includes:

• Make concepts concrete with examples and demos
• Care About The Visuals
• Project Confidence
• Engage The Audience

Ian provides summaries for each of the points, describing what the speaker did to accomplish it and how it could be put into practice by other presenters.

From the Developer Drive blog there's a recent post with some suggestions on how you can help to prevent SQL injections in your PHP application and make it that much harder for would-be attackers to do what they shouldn't.

Why do SQL injections happen so often? The shortest answer is that SQL injections are so popular because of poor programming. Hackers know about the potential of a successful SQL injection attack and they search for vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, very often they don't have to search hard - vulnerabilities pop right in their face. [...] The good news is that fortunately, SQL injections are also relatively easy to prevent.

They list nine easy things you can do to help prevent the attacks:

• Patch your SQL server regularly
• Limit the use of dynamic queries
• Escape user input
• Store database credentials in a separate file
• Use the principle of least privilege
• Turn magic quotes off
• Disable shells
• Disable any other DB functionality you don't need
• Test your code

The Oracle Technology Network has posted the first article in a series by Eli White looking at building a scalable PHP/MySQL web application.

Hopefully the most important lesson you can learn here is to understand what you will need to do to scale in the future. By knowing this, you can do only what you need at each phase of your project without "coding yourself into a corner", ending up in a situation where it's hard to take the next scalability step. [...] In this two-part article I will share some of the lessons learned, and take you step by step through a standard process of scaling your application.

He touches on a few different topics in this first part of the series - performance vs scalability, tuning your PHP installation and database load balancing through master/slave replication.

Sven Eisenschmidt has put together a site that want to help beginners with the Symfony2 framework get up to speed quickly with some handy tips and tricks they can use in their development.

Some of the tips listed so far include:

• How to free Symfony2 from the sandbox tutorial (with some help from Git)
• Doctrine in the Real World - Presentation from Symfony Live 2011
• The Path to Symfony in the USA- Presentation from Symfony Live 2011
• Form naming
• Translate form labels inside Twig templates

Check out the full blog for more tips and links to presentations.

In some of his development with the Zend Framework Ryan Mauger has gathered some helpful tips and tricks. His dropped these into an Evernote notebook and shared it for others to use.

I have started compiling a notebook of tips and answers to commonly asked questions to Zend Framework questions, and common patterns of Zend Framework application design. I'm kicking it off with two notes, one for modules setup, and the other for how to route your requests so that you can divide your controllers up further with subfolders (no hacking required!)

The notebook can be found here. Have some tips of your own you have a post about? Let us know!

If you're one of the developers that have the basics of the language down and want to improve your skills to the next level, you'd do well to check out this post from Webgeekly.com packed with little helpful hints you can use to make your life easier.

PHP is a very versatile programming language that can achieve the same objective in multiple ways. You can read more about that in my 'The Art of Programming' post. Below are a few tips I've picked up from past projects that can improve your code readability and maintainability and make you a neater, more organized PHP programmer.

There's lots of useful hints included - most of them are relatively basic, but they can even be helpful as reminders for those seasoned developers:

• Separate Configuration Files
• Use Indentation and Spacing
• Give your Variables Meaningful Names
• Use Ternary Operators
• Use Assignment Operators
• Use Objects instead of Functions
• Aim for Loose Coupling, Strong Cohesion

From LearnComputer.com there's a few hints they've put together that might help you with that next PHP-related job interview.

So you've been slinging resumes for a while and now you have an interview for an awesome PHP job. While part of the interview will be the typical job interview, you should also be prepared for a technical interview. Technical interviews are often given to determine how well you truly know the technologies with which you'll be working. There are numerous books and articles to help you prepare for the job interview portion but very little has been said on preparing for a PHP technical interview.

They've broken down their advice into a few different sections including some sample PHP questions you might get asked about both PHP and MySQL, a quick look at frameworks and the recommendation of the book PHP and MySQL Web Development to help round out your knowledge.

Richard Smaizys has a new post to his blog with a few simple tips you can follow to help improve your code's style and readability.

So you have to know and you can not forget that your program (not only websites) is like a living beast with whom many people might work in the future. Your code is like your art piece which sometimes need editing, renewal and etc. You can not just think that you will always be the person who manages everything and supports all the bugs. By understanding this you also agree that the code must be maintainable and readable not only for you after a year or two but to other people that may not be so skilled or advanced and otherwise.

He covers two things in this post (there's this other about brackets) - tabs versus spaces (or hard vs soft tabs) and a bit more on braces, specifically about the same line/next line debate.

Have some code style tips of your own or just want to discuss Richard's suggestions? Leave a comment on the post!

Following up on their tips for PHP beginners they posted a little while back, Mashable has a a new article with a few more advanced tips from the same group.

Well, if you happen to be one of those more seasoned PHP developers, this post is for you. Our expert panel has returned to offer helpful hints and suggestions for those of you who have long since passed the "beginner" milestone and are on your way to becoming true masters of the art and science of PHP. Feel free to ask questions and leave your own suggestions in the comments - the lovely people we interviewed in this post are quite likely to pop in and reply to you directly.

Tips included in this article are things like:

• Stay Current
• Interact With Others' Code
• Ask Questions
• Keep It Simple
• Maintain Your Code
• Work With Others

Notice a trend? Working with others outside of your own development bubble can really help not only your development skills but can also provide you with a good way to give back to the community.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post giving you five tips you can use to help speed up Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio if you happen to use one of those IDEs.

Eclipse Helios (3.6) includes an improved version of Eclipse PDT, labeled 2.2. It is also included in the current Zend Studio (7.1 and above). Among other enhancements, it dramatically improved the performance of code lookup-related tasks like searching references, creating a type hierarchy and even code completion.

Some of the recommendations have more to do with the system the IDE is running on, but they're helpful none the less:

• Disable virus scanners
• Use a fast storage device
• Keep your JVM up to date
• Delete the database if your experience problems
• Do not backup the database