The Call for Papers has been wrapped up, the speakers have been selected and we're happy to announce that the schedule for this year's event has been posted!

Topics for this year's event include: Building testable applications, PHP extensions, Database testing, ElasticSearch, Mentoring developers, RESTful APIs. If you want to get in on the Early Bird pricing ($150 USD for the two-day event), hurry and get them before the April 15th deadline!

Zend anticipates its biggest ever conference due to growing interest in the practical use of PHP to develop cloud applications, which is reflected in the 400 percent increase in cloud-related submissions to this year's Call for Papers. Strong interest in enterprise mobility, web automation and PHP advances are also reflected in this year's content. ZendCon 2011 will offer keynotes by industry and enterprise IT leaders, in-depth technical sessions and tutorials, technology previews, vendor exhibits and networking opportunities. The event targets professional developers, IT/development managers, system administrators and business managers interested in PHP technologies and solutions for web, mobile and cloud.

The point out a few highlights of this year's even including topics like cloud infrastructure, RIAs, mobile devices, application architecture and best practices. There'll also be a preview of what's coming in Zend Framework 2.0 as related to its cloud integration functionality. You can learn more about the conference and get your tickets at ZendCon.com.

The 7th Annual Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will take place October 17-20, 2011, In Santa Clara, California. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and brings together PHP developers and IT managers from around the world to discuss PHP best practices and explore new technologies.

The Early Bird pricing will last until September 10th saving you about $200 USD off the price of the ticket. The full ZendCon experience (Tutorials & Conference) is $1,195 USD or you can opt for just the Tutorial for $445 USD or just the Conference for $945 USD. You're in luck if you're looking for discounts, though - they have lots o them including ones for ZendCon alumni, group discounts, ZCEs and students.

The schedule's not quite out yet, but as you can see by some of the comments from speakers on Twitter, it's shaping up to be a great schedule. Topics like CouchDb, component architecture, design patterns, Redis and dependency injection will all be there.

The PHP Community Conference is all about you! Come on out to Nashville for a different kind of conference this spring. We're going to hear from community members about projects they're working on and how they were inspired. It's going to be a fun, laid-back event where you and the people you'll meet can collaborate to build some awesome applications of your own with PHP.

The price for a two day ticket to the even comes in at $349.95 USD and includes access to both the tutorial day and the normal conference day. You can purchase the ticket through their Eventbrite page and reserve your spot today.

The German symfony conference will take place in October 8th, 2010 in Cologne. Registration for conference and workshop is now open. Participation is 120 Euro for the day, including food and drinks. The event will take place at Komed in Cologne.

This discount will only last until Wednesday (the 29th) so if you want in on it, order your ticket quickly! You can find out more about what'll be happening at the event on the session list page of the main conference site.

If you've never heard of it before, you are probably wondering what it is and why you should care. Code Jam is an annual programming competition sponsored by Google. The top 25 scores receive cash prizes and if you make it to the final round, they fly you to their offices to compete on site. This year, the finals are being held in Dublin!

CodeJam pits developers and programmer against each other to solve complicated software problems in the language of your choice. You can check out the rules page for more information about the competition. You can also use some of the practice tests from years before to give you an idea of what the contest is like.

Be sure to register before May 7th - that's when the first round (qualification) starts!

The Call for Papers for TEK-X is finally over-with more than ten proposals submissions for each slot available in the schedule, our evaluation committee is hard at work preparing the best schedule for what promises to be a can't-miss event for PHP developers in 2010.

You can reserve your spot via their online registration form and get Early Bird pricing until January 31st, 2010. There's several other discounts you can get as well for government, academic and user group members (and more!)

In this article we look at the registration script for our bookmark system. The script is basically responsible for admitting new users to our system. As you will see, it sets certain requirements that a new user must meet before they are admitted and also implements some data checking for security purposes, since it is going to receive a lot of 'outside' data that it needs to incorporate into the application.

The script takes in a username, password, email address and optional values for an image and a personalized color scheme. Some simple validation is done and escaping on the strings before they're put into the MySQL database. They also briefly mention some error handling that can be done by logging issues to the web server's error log.

PHP is the language that runs the web, however, for a long time; PHP had a reputation of poor performance on Windows. Thanks to the hard work of the PHP Windows team and help from their friends in Redmond, Windows is now a first class citizen for PHP deployment as well as development. We asked two of the Core Windows PHP developers what they thought about the progress that PHP had made on Windows.

The contest is easy - make a brand new PHP application (not a port) build on a Windows and IIS7 setup. All needed licenses, software and hardware - each contestant gets their own Windows Server 2008 VPS to work on - that'll be used for the competition. Applications will be judged on originality, how complete they are, how/if they use Windows features and how well they're documented.

The contest will run from April 17th through May 31st to give you plenty of time to develop your application. You can find out more about the contest and register on this page off the Dutch PHP Conference wiki (the registration link is up there near the top).

You know who you are. Yes, you. You had that really, really good idea for an Open Source Bridge talk. But somehow, time just got away from you. And now you're thinking that you probably won't complete it before midnight tonight. Oh yes, we know you all too well. Well, buck up little camper. We've got a ray of sunshine for you.

The conference is being held June 17th through 19th in Portland, Oregon (former home of another large technology conference) and will feature a wide range of technology-related sessions and events. You can submit your ideas and register to attend on their site. The Early Bird pricing on the tickets is $175 USD and will only last until April 10th.