Every PHP Developer is at core a PHP evangelist, someone who is ready to raise the PHP flag and defend it. This does not mean your answer to everything is PHP, as a true evangelist you know the strengths and shortcomings of your own language, and when to just say "don't use it", but you are also ready to defend it and prove its worthiness when its misjudged or just plainly misunderstood.

He includes an example from the Brazilian PHP community, an incident where a local TV newscast got their facts wrong and noted that "most things ending in .php were a virus" and should be avoided. The PHP community, of course, got up in arms about it and, thankfully, the news station realized their mistake and made a retraction about their comments.

So why the tale? Well this is what being a PHP Developer is to me, its more then just being a member, its like a family. And like any family you need to be there for the bad and the good, and watch out for each other. That means you must really embrace the language, learn about it.

It's official: PHP Conference Brazil 2012 will take place at UNIFIEO, in the city of Osasco (SP) Brazil from November 30th to December 2nd. Tracks for the event were chosen by the audience, through a poll we've published on Twitter: Frameworks & Tools, APIs & Webservices, Challenges and Trends, Case Studies and Successful Cases, Security and Job Scenarios.

This year's event will be happening from November 30th through December 2nd at UNIFIEO, in the city of Osasco (SP) and they're currently looking for sponsors, so if you're interested get in contact with them!

Hermes Alves has launched a CodeIgniter resource in Portuguese, located at codeigniter.com.br. The site includes a discussion forum, mailing-list, and a few other resources.

The CodeIgniter.com.br site is meant to be a collaborative place for the Brazilian CI community to come and share their knowledge, tips and scripts they've created and used in this popular framework.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapeco on June 20." [...] He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

The schedule for the event can be found here with details on which talks will be given when (including Elton's at 8am on the 21st.

There is a greater disparity with PHP use in Emerging Markets. The largest number of developers using the language can be found in Eastern Europe (39%). India and Brazil have similar usage at a little over 31%. In contrast, only 21% of Chinese developers are utilizing PHP. In North America, 35% of developers are using PHP.

They also talk about the usage rates of a few other technologies, including Flash, Ajax, Windows, and Linux.

Cal Evans also mentions these trends in this post on the Zend Developer Zone as well as linking to the full EDC report.