On his "MySQL Talk" blog Joe Devon has posted a (very) belated wrapup of ZendCon 2011 he attended earlier this year.

I started writing a Zendcon recap post as soon as I got back. And then mis-timed a couple projects. Note to freelancers, make sure your new gig starts AFTER your old gig is over. Or you'll be working an insane schedule. Hence the lateness... First the good part. What made Zendcon special.

He notes that it was a great opportunity to meet people "in real life" that he'd only spoken with online and the overall wonderful experience it was. He mentions some specific people in the PHP community including Juozas Kaziukenas, Daniel Cousineau, some impromptu singing of Queen songs and many more (too many to name here). He also mentions some of the sessions attended including the tutorial on Zend Framework and an uncon talk from Ilia Alshanetsky about optimization.

Josh Adell recently attended to Raleigh, North Carolina arm of the CodeWorks conference and has posted about some of his experience there (and specifics on each presentation).

I had a great time at CodeWorks 2011 in Raleigh this week, put on by the great folks at php|architect. Here is a rundown of the presentations, with some of my thoughts. [...] To all the conference speakers, organizers and attendees, I want to say thank you for a fun and educational experience.

The sessions for this stop on the tour were:

• "CI:IRL" by Beth Tucker Long
• "How Beer Made Me a Better Developer" by Jason Austin
• "What's new in PHP 5.4" by Cal Evans
• "Refactoring and Other Small Animals" by Marco Tabini
• "jQuery Mobile and Phonegap" by Terry Ryan
• "REST Best Practices" by Keith Casey

Two recent summaries of this year's Zend/PHP Conference have been posted - one from an attendee and speaker, another from a member of the Zend team.

In his post Joshua talks about the conference in general - the quality of the talks he went to and the community he experienced while there. He also mentions his presentation, "Puppet for Dummies" and some sessions from the Unconference.

Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend adds his perspective and mentions some of the new technologies that were introduced during the event including their PHPCloud platform and the Zend Application Fabric.

Philip Norton has posted his extensive summary of his experience at this year's PHP North West conference in Manchester. He details each of the sessions he attended and various other conference-related activities including:

• Ian Barber's keynote "Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants"
• Sebastian Bergmann's "PHP Testers Toolbox"
• Rowan Merewood's "Estimation Or 'How To Dig Your Own Grave'"
• Paul Lemon's "Feeling Secure? Notes From The Field"
• Jacopo Romei's "Many To Many - No Man Is An Island"

Check out the full post for summaries and his opinion on these and other sessions (and his experiences helping out during the event).

Marco Lopes has posted a wrapup of the PHP North West conference that he recently attended in Manchester. In it he talks about the tutorial sessions he attended the first day as well as the other shorter sessions later in the conference. His is the first summary of several Ibuildings employees that made it to the event.

He covers the content presented by Arne Blankerts (of ThePHP.cc) about general applications security. His session covered security on various levels, not just in the PHP code - hardware, XSS, session hijacking, captchas, database issues and clickjacking. Marco's afternoon was spent at Lorna Mitchell's web services tutorial. Sessions attended on Day 1 included the keynote from Ian Barber, Sebastian Marek and Rowan Merewood.

Pim Elshoff has a new post to his blog about his experience at this year's PfCongres event (joining other summaries from a speaker and another attendee).

Saturday September 17th, starting at about 9am, the conference hosted a series of talks concerning PHP and related web technologies. Topics varied from tech updates to PHP internals to CSS. [...] I enjoyed most of the talks, even though I didn't learn too much. It was a good chance to meet people and talk about our mutual interests, problems and of course solutions [...] My experience was very positive; I will definitely visit more congresses if I get the chance.

Talks he attended included:

• Michaelangelo van Dam's talk "Community works!"
• Richard Tuin's "Let's live inside the browser"
• Derick Rethans' "PHP extensions, what and why?"
• Thijs Feryn's "Lost in the Cloud"

If you weren't able to attend you can see comments and slides from (most) presentations over on the Joind.in event page.

Michaelangelo van Dam attended this year's Pfcongres conference [joind.in] and has shared some of his thoughts and reflections about the event in a new post to his blog.

This Saturday I started early to go to Pfcongres, a small PHP community conference in Utrecht organized by the Dutch PHP user group PHPFreakz and after about two hours driving I arrived about half an hour in time before the conference started, with me kick starting with my keynote "Community Works", a 199 slide deck explaining what the PHP community is and how people can be part of that community.

He talks briefly about the good (a good balance for Dutch/Non-Dutch speakers), the bad (his early start time, heh) and an inevitable part of any large event - the ugly (wifi issues). Overall, though, he enjoyed the event and praised it as a good example of what a small community can do to provide quality at a low price.

The Ibuildings techPortal has posted the summary of Day 2 of the Dutch PHP Conference from Marco De Bortoli with some of his experiences from this year's event.

This year as part of the Ibuildings team I attended the Dutch PHP Conference for the first time. What can I say? Well, it was an unbelievable experience; I enjoyed every moment spent there. [...] There was also the high quality of the presented talks, but also for the great opportunity to spend good time with my colleagues at Ibuildings and people from other companies all around the world.

He mentions some talks specifically like Helgi's "First Class APIs", "Managing MySQL" by Thijs Feryn, a look at Modular Architecture from Kore Nordmann and Tobias Schlitt as well as David Zülke's map reduce session.

One thing I really appreciated about DPC was the Open Source and Open Knowledge spirit found there. Speakers were not there just only to talk and present something, they were there more to share their own knowledge and to share ideas and maybe a new solution to their problems. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things I took with me from DPC.

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.

On the PHPWomen blog today there's a new post from Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems talking about her experiences at this year's Dutch PHP Conference (2011) that wrapped up about two weeks ago in Amsterdam.

About two weeks ago I attended the Dutch PHP Conference with many thanks to PHPWomen and Ibuildings for the ticket. So far I have attended almost all editions of the Dutch PHP Conference (DPC), I only missed one. So I knew it would be awesome before it even started and I was right!

She covers each of the days and some of the talks and events she attended including the keynote from Aral Blakan, a talk about test-driven development, the unconference, a look at the "new era of PHP frameworks" and character sets in MySQL (co-presented by Ligaya Turmelle, a fellow PHPWomen member).