• Paul Reinhimer
• Sean Coates
• Sara Golemon
• Terry Chay
• Ed Finkler

Oh, and don't forget to read Sean's disclaimers when you listen to the show. You'll take it all a little less seriously and enjoy the ride a little bit more.

Chicago Illinois is the third largest city in the United States. It's also very different in personality and structure than other large US cities, taking on the rather laid back flavor that defines the Midwest, but also has the dubious distinction of being the "travel hub" of the United States. The size and travel possibilities made it an ideal location for the php|tek conference in May, hosted by php|architect.

She talks about the speakers, the location, people she met, keynotes (Rasmus and Marco Tabini) and tons of other great info. Check out the full post for the complete story.

I was all set to present at the PHP|Tek show here in Chicago yesterday when I encountered a very (very very) ugly hard drive failure, 3 slides into my deck. [...] If you're looking for similar slides, these ones from a previous presentation in New York are close [pdf], though not exactly the same.

So, in lieu of the slides, he's shared lots of great links for the things he was going to talk about in his presentation including:

• Picnik
• the Flex Showcase
• Cal Evans' Flex and PHP tutorial
• the JSON library and AMFPHP combination

For the second year in a row, our php|tek conference is completely sold out!

You can still tune in during the event for up-to-date information, comments, slides and more details from the conference floor'"including some audio and video podcasts from our Pro::PHP Podcast team.

If you didn't get in in time, be sure to check out the schedule so you'll know what kind of talks will be happening at the conference and what you can expect to hear about from the podcasters.

This year's speakers include a who's who of the PHP community, including Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski, Ilia Alshanetsky and Wez Furlong, as well as many php|architect regulars, like Jeff Moore and Chris Shiflett, and, of course, a number new faces with some thrilling talks planned for the conference.

You can get the full details on the conference and sing up today over on the main conference site or just check out the schedule to see what's being offered.

You can also see comments from some of the speakers on their blogs:

• Sara Golemon
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Sebastian Bergmann
• Mike Potter

Last week, Marco Tabini, publisher of php|architect and all around nice guy, posted the "Call For Papers" for php|tek 2007. [...] Since I couldn't find my "marketing speak to English" dictionary, I decided to call Marco and see if he could translate it for me manually.

Cal asks him what the theme means and what it means to those proposing sessions and for those that will be making the trip to Chicago this year in May. Marco's answers cover the two-layer intention behind the theme and the flexibility that it brings. They have their ideas on what it suggests, but it could just as well mean many things to many different people. The intent is to represent how PHP has evolved and that it's really become a mature, innovative language to work with.

The conference will be held in Chicago this year, moving from it's previous, more northern location. The conference starts on tuesday, May 15th with a day of in-depth tutorials and goes through the 18th full of talks and time for developers to enjoy being with other developers. Registration is already open for the even, and prices start at around $700 USD.

If you want to get involved in the conference and present at talk, you're in luck too. The Call for Papers is already open for your submissions. There's no specific tracks that the talks need to fit into. They go for the tagging-based approach to let conference-goers know what the contents of the talks are.