As a part of this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (2008), the PHP Women group hosted an unconference session. They talk about the session in this new post to their site.

At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled "Women in IT". In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP. We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded.

You can download the audio from the phpwomen.org website and check out the forum entry to continue the discussion. Their post also includes several talking points concerning women in the IT industry and how PHP Women can help.

Jamie Hemmett has a few suggestions for local user groups out there on what to do and not to do to help make their group successful. Some of it was gathered from personal experience, other tips from the recent user group panel discussion from this year's ZendCon.

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Some of the observations/comments she mentions include:

• Freelancing PHP developers may not feel like attending a group with "the competition"
• Several factors dissuade developers from attending (distance, confusing schedules, timing)
• Some ideas that groups out there could use to attract and keep more members
• Why the groups can make you a better developer
• and some sponsorship/promotion ideas to help grow and better the group

This is a great post packed with some good suggestions and observations. If you're involved at all in your local group (or would like to be) be sure to read it.

If you were at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo, you probably remember the Appcelerator team that was there promoting their product in the expo. Well, they also spent some time interviewing some of the attendees about PHP and their experiences with it. The Zend Developer Zone points out that they've now posted these to YouTube.

Appcelerator was a sponsor at ZendCon 08 this year but obviously they were much more as well. They created a series of videos from interviews they shot while there.

It's a series of four videos with titles like "Developers Hate PHP!", "Developers Love PHP!" and some "PHP Developer Gripes". Check them out and see if you can spot some of the notable names in the PHP community.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a recording (from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2008) of the UnConference session user group panel discussion.

Ben Ramsey, Software Architect at Schematic and PHP community leader, and Keith Casey, founder of CaseySoftware, held an UnCon session at ZendCon this year to discuss PHP User Groups.

You can either listen to it on the page or you can always grab the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

This recent article on the Redmond Developer News site looks at a partnership one of their largest local businesses, Microsoft, has with Zend and the work they're doing with PHP. They ask "what's next" for these two companies and their future of Microsoft in the community.

Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.

They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.

As a new meme was launched at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and, while it's not directly related to PHP, it was still very warmly accepted by the community - Christian Flickinger's "Fails" logos (see here). He's written up a post about it for his blog too:

So, a week before PHP|TEK 2008 I came up with the genius idea to take the Ruby on Rails logo, which is protected against re-use (hahaha), and parody it. I wanted to express my views of Ruby on Rails (though never have using RoR) through this modification.

I took the logo and simply changed the "R" to an "F" using a font that was almost identical to the original.

You can ask anyone that was at ZendCon this year about them - they were everywhere. Christian did a great job on a simple parody that shares the sentiment of many members of the PHP community (and others outside I'm sure). He has them for sale on his etsy shop if you'd like to pick up some of your own.

For those that weren't able to attend this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, here's some posts and slides from the conference to give you a taste:

Slides

• David Sklar - Static and Dynamic Analysis at Ning
• Ben Ramsey - Distribution and Publication With Atom Web Services
• Mike Naberezny & Matthew Weier O'Phinney - PHP Developer Best Practices
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects, phpUnderControl: A Quick Start to Continuous Integration
• Brian DeShong - Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools
• Stefan Esser - Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications
• Jay Pipes - Legend of Drunken Query Master: The Apprentice's Journey
• John Coggeshall - Ria Development With Flex And PHP
• Ed Finkler - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR
• Matthew Turland - ZendCon 2008 Slides Up (Creating Web Services with Zend Framework & Web Scraping)
• Rob Richards - Digital Identity
• Elizabeth Smith - PECL Picks, PHP on the Desktop (PHP-GTK) & Runs on PHP5
• Ivo Jansch - Enterprise PHP Development

Blog Posts

• PHPWomen - Days 0 and 1, ZendCon08 Days 2 and 3
• Daniel Cousineau - ZendCon08 Day 1 - PECL Picks, ZendCon08 Day 1 - The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development, ZendCon08 Day 1 Wrap Up
• Ibuildings - Daily ZendCon posts and wrapup
• Christopher Jones - ZendCon2008 Wrapup
• Paul Reinheimer - ZendCon
• Stas Malyshev - ZendCon 08 php 5.3
• Rob Allen ZendCon 08
• Chris Shiflett - ZendCon
• Keith Casey - ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 1, ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 2, ZendUnCon - Update 3, ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 4, ZendCon 2008 - Day 0, ZendCon 2008 - Closing Notes
• Elizabeth Smith - ZendCon 2008 wrap up
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney - ZendCon08 Wrapup
• Ivo Jansch - ZendCon 2008: more community, less corporate
• Brian DeShong - Conference wrap-up: ZendCon 2008

With the recent release of the 1.6 version of the Zend Framework, Andi Gutmans has posted some thoughts and highlights of features in the new version.

The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together.

He mentions the Dojo integration, the updates to the SOAP component, updates to make test-driven development simpler and a reminder about ZendCon08 coming soon that will feature several Zend Framework-centric talks.

Andi Gutmans has posted a reminder about the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo happening Spetember 15th through 18th in Santa Clara, CA.

I can't believe it's already ZendCon time again! I've been meeting with the planning committee and I'm really excited about this year's conference. All the usual things are back to make it great: we have a great lineup of speakers, the Meet the Teams session, and special guests like noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of ajaxian.com, and Alex Russell from Dojo.

He mentions things like the unconference (with even more great speakers, just in a more "unofficial" setting) and about the conference wiki with more details on who will be there and what they'll be attending.

There's still seats open for this year's conference, so reserve your spot today - check out the registration page on the ZendCon site for more information.