PHP Québec is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the PHP Québec Conference. The Conference will take place in Montréal, Québec, Canada between March 4 and 6th 2009. We are looking for speakers willing to share their expertise with Canadian and United States PHP professionals. The Conference features technical talks and Labs dedicated to advanced software development techniques with PHP5 and PHP6, XML, web services,databases, etc., project management where speakers and visitor swill try to find solutions to actual business problems. Organizers will prioritize new and original topics in English or French. For more information, visit the website: http://conf.phpquebec.com

The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce its first international PHP Conference. It will be celebrated on Saturday, September 27th, at Barcelona. The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and surroundings, and also evangelizing the PHP technology on universities and enterprises as well. This year they had celebrated another events but this one is the first which will be developed completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others. For more information about Barcelona PHP Conference 2008 and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es

The premiere PHP Conference – Celebrate the 14th event with us! Today the ICP is the reference whenever substructures of existing technologies should be extended or the basis for new developments should be created. Thus, you do not only profit from the concentrated know-how of worldwide acknowledged, international PHP-experts but also from the professional transfer of knowledge between industry and development. With its mixture of topics the International PHP Conference provides an ideal resource for all professionals and their successful daily routine within the whole PHP-spectrum. Insights into current Web 2.0 technologies, Security, Best Practices for tools and components, Enterprise know-how, databases, architectures and more are provided at the ICP 2008. The International PHP Conference celebrates it's 14th Edition. Celebrate with us, and profit from our Celebrate 14teen offers! 199 € / Special Price 149 €* / Special Price for Freelancer 99 €** / Student Price Offer is valid till 30th September! Register now! * Confirmation with your company's letter head ** With Student ID. Limited seating available

php|tek 2008: Chicago The publishers of php|architect Magazine and Python Magazine are proud to announce the joint php|works / PyWorks 2008 conferences in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. php|works and PyWorks feature over 65 talks, 10 tutorials and 5 tracks on topics ranging from web development to database optimization with PHP and Python over the course of two days, social events in the evening and plenty of networking opportunities with industry peers. This year, the PHP Community (and the Python Community, too!) meets November 12-14 for one of North America's premier PHP conferences of 2008. Join us to hear top speakers such as Derick Rethans (eZ Systems), Chris Shiflett (OmniTI), Mike Potter (Adobe) and more.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release. Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.9: Updated PCRE to version 7.7. Fixed overflow in memnstr(). Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given. Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension. Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global. For a full list of changes in PHP 4.4.9, see the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. Windows binaries will be available starting with alpha2 (intermediate snapshots available at snaps.php.net). The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! The purpose of this alpha release is to encourage users to not only actively participate in identifying bugs, but also in ensuring that all new features or necessary backwards compatibility breaks are noted in the documentation. Please report any findings to the QA mailinglist or the bug tracker. There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes: Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated) Late static binding and __callStatic Lambda functions and closures Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions Optional cyclic garbage collection Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql Windows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore (details) New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:" Several under the hood changes also require in depth testing with existing applications to ensure that any backwards compatibility breaks are minimized. This is especially important for users that require the undocumented Zend engine multibyte support. The current release plan states that there will be alpha/beta/RC releases in 2-3 week intervals with an expected stable release of PHP 5.3 between mid September and mid October of 2008.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage for ext/reflection, ext/dom and ext/exif by about 10% each. While the organization of the TestFest was a bit adhoc, there were numerous TestFest events in local user groups. So the number of people exposed to the PHP test framework is much greater. Hopefully this will lead to more people submitting bug reports with an accompanying phpt test file! Our top submitter Felix De Vliegher has actually committed his last submissions himself since, based on the high quality of his submissions, he has been granted commit rights to the PHP repository. We have not heard back from all participants, but we encourage everybody to blog about their experience and provide us with feedback on how to improve future events. Now better late than never, here are the 10 winners of the promised elePHPant raffle sponsored by Nexen. Note that Felix asked me not to include him in the raffle, since he is already herding quite a number of elePHPants at home. Eric Stewart Håvard Eide Marc Veldman Michelangelo van Dam Rein Velt Rob Young Sami Greenbury Sebastian Deutsch Sebastian Schürmann Stefan Koopmanschap We will provide Nexen with the email addresses of the winners, so that they can arrange to get the elePHPants shipped. Also for those people wondering, you can continue to submit tests on the TestFest submission site. A bit thank you to all participants and TestFest organizers! Without the countless people that helped organize local events, implement the infrastructure and submissions reviewers, the TestFest would have obviously not worked out as well as it has. We will surely do similar events in the future based on the big success of TestFest 2008.

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions. The most noticable changes are the function reference, predefined variables, context options and parameters and predefined exceptions manual pages, for which we would really appreciate feedback on. The upcomming PHP5.3 release introduces several major features such as namespaces, closures, late static bindings, internationalization functions, INI sections, and Phar among others. We would really appreciate any and all help we can get improving the documentation. In related news, the manual was relicensed recently and is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

Join us for the largest PHP only gathering, September 15th - 18th. Discuss topics such as: PHP in the Enterprise Advanced PHP Programming Techniques Scalability PHP and RIAs Our guest keynote speaker this year is Zak Greant who will be speaking on The Age of Literate Machines For more information and to register for the biggest PHP even of the year, visit http://zendcon.com/

php|works 2008 will be held November 12-14, 2008 in Atlanta, GA. Our Call for Papers is now open, but the deadline for submissions is July 25, 2008. This year's php|works takes place concurrently with PyWorks 2008, MTA's new fall Python conference, organized by the publishers of Python Magazine, and attendees to both conferences will be able to attend talks from either. This gives us a great opportunity to create cross-over talks to cover topics that bridge both worlds, enriching members of either communities and facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas. If you have a topic that fits the bill, or that could be equally interesting to both PHPers and Pythonistas, don't hesitate to propose it. For more information about our Call for Papers, visit our site at http://phpworks.mtacon.com/c/p/phpworks,cfp.