With the ConFoo conference quickly approaching, one of the key things to have up and working at 100% is the conference's website. Anna Filina, one of the organizers of the event, has posted about some of the processes they've gone through to make sure everything's ready.

Building a conference website as the conference was being organized is probably one of the biggest challenges I ever faced. It is also the project I'm the most proud of. I'd like to share that experience with you. By the way, the event is still in progress, so my work on the site is not done.

She talks about some of the decisions they've made so far including tossing out the code they'd had for previous sites and a list of ten priorities they wanted in the new version. These included the look and feel, features to handle the Call for Papers and selection process, monitoring tools and the ability to schedule the talks.

Instead of comparing the software itself, the GnomeOnTheRun.com blog takes a look at the project homepages of three major PHP CMS/blogging tools - Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress - to see when they might tell us about the project itself. (Some of the homepages are actually built using the software too).

I found some interesting things that might shed some light onto the different projects. This is all based on January 11th, and 28th homepages, so by the time you read this a lot may have changed. Rather than go into great detail, I'll provide short lists of interesting things I noticed.

He looks at three different sides of the sites - how the markup is structured and if they conformed to an HTML standard, the overall performance of the sites and the actual content of the site (how useful it is, the organization, etc). You'll have to read the post to see what his conclusions were, though.

On the Millwood Online blog there's a quick step-by-step about getting multiple Drupal sites up and running on one code installation.

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

The process is pretty simple - install Drupal normally and set it up for the main domain, then change the directory name for the settings and add another for the new domain name. Go update your Apache virtual host configuration file to point to the new location and restart the web server. Both of your domains should be set and ready.

In a new article on the Personal Democracy site Nancy Scola looks at the recent change of the Whitehouse.gov website over to use the Drupal content management system.

After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The change was made so the site could be both more effect and easier to maintain with the added benefit of being built on a well-developed and supported Open Source platform. Nancy also suggests that a more towards Open Source like this could help things lean towards more openness in the general democracy.

The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

The MTA group has officially released the main website for this year's CodeWorks traveling PHP "roadshow".

Welcome! CodeWorks 2009 is a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine. CodeWorks will travel to seven locations across the United States between September 22nd and October 5th included. Each two-day event includes a day of in-depth tutorials and a day of conference talks arranged across three different tracks, all presented by the best experts in the business.

Each of the stops along the conference route (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, New York) will be limited to 300 attendees in each location and pricing will start at $99 for the Early Bird tickets. You can find out more information about signing up on this page of the CodeWorks site.

In case you hadn't heard by now, the symfony project's components sub-project of the main framework has gotten its own website:

Some time ago, I have introduced the new "Symfony Components" project. It is a sub-project of Symfony that aims to give more importance to some of the great libraries we have developed for Symfony. [...] Today, I am happy to announce that the Symfony Components now have their dedicated website.

Each of the current components (YAML, Event Dispatcher, Dependency Injection, Template - though the last three are "coming soon") have documentation, info about the API, examples of how to install and use it and how to give back to the code for the component directly.

Federico Cargnelutti mentions in his latest blog entry, a new Zend Framework book has been published (from W. Jason Gilmore) called "Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework".

This book embraces a teaching strategy of learning by doing, showing you how to build website features you'll actually want to use within your own websites. Among other things you'll learn how to manage data submitted through web forms, send unformatted and HTML e-mails through your website, manage user registrations, logins, and recover forgotten passwords, and even create the structure for a simple social network.

You can find out more about the book, including where to order a copy, on its website. The PDF version costs only $22 USD and if you want a print version, that'll be $32 USD (for U.S. order only). You can read some of Jason's own thoughts on the release in this blog entry.

On the SitePoint.com Web Tech blog, Craig Buckler explains how you can test multiple PHP/MySQL/Apache websites on your local machine without having to change your Apache configuration each time - the magic of VirtualHosts.

It is rare to find a web developer with responsibility for just one website. In this article, we will configure your development PC so you can test any number of websites using a dedicated domain name for each one. You will require a local installation of Apache 2.2 and, optionally, PHP and MySQL.

He explains the only two parts you'll need to get it up and running - changes to your hosts file and updates to the Apache configuration file to add in VirtualHost records for each site. He also throws in a bonus tip about detecting which host the script is being used on via the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable.

On the Ibuildings techPortal blog today there's a new article (a case study of sorts) on how to survive a plane crash. More specifically, a look at how the NU.nl news website handled the load as a result of the crash of a Turkish Airliner.

On February 25th, 2009, less than 90 days after the new infrastructure was rolled out, it was stress tested when a Turkish Airliner crashed at Schiphol. On that day the new site set a single day traffic record by serving up 21 million page views in a 24 hour time period, all without any noticeable slowdown and without having to bring additional hardware online to handle the additional load.

Their framework of choice, CodeIgniter, allowed then to create snippets of content - cached versions - that could be pulled and displayed without having to render them every single time. They looked into the Varnish project and a ATK-based CMS to piece it all back together.