Client Bucket Workshops is holding another event in New York at the City College of New York on January 29th - "Content Management System (CMS) Design with PHP, Javascript, and MySQL: Learn How to Design a Dynamic Content Driven Website from Scratch or by Using a framework". It's a full day event happening this Saturday.

A website Content Management System (CMS) is a framework that simplifies the management of content published on the web. Smart administrators and individual website owners use content management systems because they save time, money, and when implemented correctly, completely eliminate the need for a webmaster. In this day long workshop we will teach novice and intermediate programmers the basics needed to build and or setup an existing CMS to better manage existing or new web content.

If you're in the New York area and are interested in building up your CMS knowledge (or just want to get started), you can find out more about the workshop here and, if it sounds interesting, register for your spot. With discounts offered off the price of the ticket drops from $125 USD down to around $79 USD - a low price for a day packed full of training.

Chinedu Chukuigwe has submitted some details about a series of courses planned as a part of the Client Bucket Workshop series for developers aiming to increase their knowledge of PHP and related technologies.

The idea is simple. No more than twelve people in a workshop led by the best of the best programmers. All profits from the Client Bucket Workshops will go toward cancer research.

Their upcoming class is a look at design patterns in PHP and ActionScript happening January 13th and 14th at the City College of New York, CUNY. The price for the full two-day event (9am-4pm) is $495 USD or, if you'd only like, you can register for only one of the days - either the 13th or 14th and get in on only the PHP or only Actionscript for $285 USD . If you'd like any more information about the project or Client Bucket Workshops, see their main site here. You can also sign up for their email list if you'd like to be informed about future workshops.

If you're going to be attending this year's International PHP Conference you'd do well to check out some of the sessions thePHP.cc will be doing during the event.

There's ten different sessions given by the different members of the trio:

• Your Tests are lying!
• Why MVC is not an application architecture ...
• Introduction to Testing with Selenium
• Practical PHP Refactoring
• Agility and Quality
• State of the Mocks
• Security by Design
• XML with PHP: The Hidden Gems
• Hand in Hand: Dynamic and Static Testing
• Beautiful Models

For more information on these sessions or just about the conference, see the main conference site for full details.

On the ThinkPHP blog Thorsten Rinne has posted an announcement about the opening of the Call for Papers for this year's International PHP Conference.

The Call for Papers for the International PHP Conference 2009 - Spring Edition has just opened! For more details, click here. The conference will take place on May 25th, 26th and 27th in Germany's capital city. See you in Berlin!

The deadline for putting your paper/suggestion in is coming up soon - February 20th, 2009. The two suggested talk times are 45 minutes (ketnote) and 60 minutes (regular session). There will also be 6 different 90 minute workshops.

If you're going to be attending this year's OpenWorld, be sure to check out the hands-on sessions they'll have to how to develop web applications with the powerful database as a backend.

The labs pack a lot into their respective slots, and I think you'll be very happy with them. The first lab is an introduction to PHP and the OCI8 extension. This is a new and improved version of the lab we ran last year. The second lab is a brand new course. It looks at more of the technologies used to build PHP Web apps - connection pooling, AJAX, debugging and frameworks.

These labs are happening on Sunday the 21st, the first day of the conference, so you'll need be sure to make plans to make it over there to catch them.

The DynamicWebPages.de site has mentioned details about the latest PHP World Kongress conference happening in Munich later this year (November 24th and 25th).

The PHP World congress offers on the first day three Workshops, per to one to the Zend Framework, eZ Components as well as Flow3, which Framework, on which in the future Typo3 will be based. [...] The second day focuses on "PHP in the Enterprise".

Speakers like Tobias Schlitt and Christian Wenz will be presenting. The attendance fee starts at about 490 Euro - check out the official site for more information on registration and the official schedule.

A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a reminder for his upcoming PHPUnit workshops happening in Melbourne, Australia (Aug 4th-6th) and in Brisbane (Aug 11th-12th and 14th).

A few seats are still available for both of these workshops. Secure your seat today! I am also available for in-house training, coaching, and consulting around the days of the workshops.

You can save your spot for one of these events by visiting this page and entering you info (you'll want the "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects" option).

Tobias Schlitt has mentioned a talk that he's giving at this year's International PHP Conference - a hands-on session detailing the use of the eZ Components framework.

At the beginning of this workshop I will give you a general overview on eZ Components, show you the most important concepts and illustrate our architecture and design decisions. After that, we will start digging into code and you will see, how different components work in practice.

The session is scheduled for the first day of the conference (the workshop day) that's three days away - the 4th of November. So, if you're interested in finding out about this powerful framework and are looking to get a good, solid introduction, be sure not to miss Tobias' session.

On his blog, Stoyan Stefanov takes a look at using on of the most popular pieces of PHP forum software out there - phpBB - and optimizing the front-end.

During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we'll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will continue to work normally. As an example, I'll use the bgcanada.com/phpBB2, the board I volunteer to administrate.

The tutorial is broken up into sections:

• The plan
• New subdomains
• Creating a new template
• Moving CSS to an external file, merging
• Copying files to the new subdomains
• Serving gzipped content
• Turning ETags off
• Expires header
• Sysadmin summary

It looks like a lot of steps, but each section is relatively short and written well so as not to have more information than needed. In the end you'll have a simple template that uses Yahoo's 14 optimization rules to make things work that much faster.