Oden’s Temple

The AFUP (Association française des utilisateurs PHP) organizes on November 11th and November 12th at the Cité des Sciences in Paris, France, the Forum PHP for its 9th edition.

The PHP Forum 2009 will welcome as a partner alongside the AFUP, the association LeMug.fr (MySQL User Group).

On this occasion, AFUP decided to extend the pre-registration at preferential rates, and also postpone the deadline for the call for speakers.

To monitor developments and press releases, visit the following link: http://afup.org/pages/forumphp2009/

The Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin (near Bonn) Germany has evolved to one of the top open source events in Europe. Being organized on a completly voluntary basis, its a meeting point for geeks, open source enthusiasts and OSS companies.

As usual, the PHP Usergroup Dortmund (in cooperation with other German usergroups) organizes a PHP project room, with talks and discussions.

The call for papers is open until May 23rd. The conference is scheduled for August 22nd - 23rd. Presenters receive at least free entance to thecomplete conference and free coffee in the PHP project room.

TestFest is upon us once again. For those who don't know, this is the time of year where User Groups and individuals donate a little of their time and effort to increasing the test coverage of PHP.

Hundreds of thousands of lines of code are working in concert to assemble one of the simplest to learn and fastest running scripting languages in the business. All this is achieved with the expectation that very few bugs will make it into releases and the ones that do will be stomped out quickly, efficiently and will never be heard from again. This is a lofty goal and is only possible through a system of tests designed to continuously evaluate the well-being of PHP.

This year the QA Team has been very busy implementing new features and improvements to make the TestFest experience easier and more enjoyable than ever before. Some these improvements include a Subversion repository for test storage and tracking, a Virtual Machine for simple test environment setup, and improved documentation of testing procedures.

2009 is looking to be the most successful TestFest event ever. Over 20 User Groups spanning Belgium, Brazil, Catalonia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, USA and the UK have already registered. This is an incredible response and we still have 2 months left to go.

Getting involved couldn't be simpler. Visit the QA TestFest page to find out how you can organize a TestFest event in your community. We are looking forward to seeing your communities tests being committed into PHP.

The Call for Papers for ZendCon 2009 has gone out. This year's conference will be held October 19th - 22nd at the San Jose Convention Center.

This year the conference has been expanded to focus on the whole development team and lifecycle of your projects. Therefore not only will there be sessions on 'writing PHP code', but are also emphasizing production processes, frameworks, management information, and the maintenance & tuning of servers. Part of doing this, is to expand the PHP Community to not just include the developers, but also the operations people, the managers, ensure that the whole team comes away from ZendCon with the knowledge to deliver better products.

More details on the Call for Papers, Tracks for this years conference, and more can be found at: http://zendcon.com/

Hurry up and submit some proposals, the CfP is only open until May 31st!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 (PHP 5.3.0RC2). This RC focuses on bug fixes and stability improvements, and we hope only minimal changes are required for the next candidate (RC3).

Expect an RC3 in 2-3 weeks, although there will not be major changes so now is a good time to start the final testing of PHP 5.3.0 before it gets released, in order to find possible incompatibilities with your project.

Please download and test this release candidate, and report any issues found. Downloads and further information is available at qa.php.net. See also the work in progress 5.3 upgrade guide.