Stuart Herbert has asked for some suggestions for the "conference virgin" to know about before heading (and/or speaking) at their first conference.

I'm speaking at the PHPNW '08 conference in November, and I've just been contacted for advice by someone understandably excited at going to her very first conference. Thing is, I've never been a conference newbie (I've always been either speaking or running a conference) so I'm not the best person to offer advice on this.

His suggestions include meeting up with friends also attending, keeping an eye out for social groups to be a part of and to bring a laptop along with you ("a lot of the conversation at the conference happens online"). The comments have some suggestions too like "don't eat alone" and "hang out in the hall if there's no talks that interested you. it's a great way to meet others."

The NETTUTS website has posted a top ten list of things from the PHP masters out there, a few words of wisdom to live by. Here's the list along with the authors of each:

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.

As the Zend Developer Zone points out there's a new interview over on the PHPWomen.org website with Nancy Wichmann, one of the members of the PHP Women group, about some of her development experiences.

NancyW - a well known drupal developer, documentation contributor, module developer/maintainer apart from these a prestigious WOMEN in the world of opensource.

The interviewer asks a wide range of questions (with some interesting answers!) on topics ranging from her college major, how she got interested in Drupal out to things like her good/bad experiences in the open source world and some advice for those new to the community.

In a new entry on his blog today, Jeremy Privett shares some of his thoughts and asks the question that's crossed more than a few developers' minds out there - "is PHP doomed?"

As an outsider looking in, and being a realist instead of a fanboy, I'm finding it extremely hard to believe that PHP is going to continue its much hyped and proclaimed success in its current circumstances.

From his point of view there's a few things that, if the web was exposed to (like "tiffs that occur on PHP Internals") PHP's popularity would fade quite a bit.

As much as I hate to say this...You guys really need to take some advice from Ruby Devs. I've been watching the Dev List over there and following it as well, and I don't see even half of the virtual crap-flinging that's almost become an everyday occurrence on the PHP Internals list.