The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy Powers, has posted their latest episode today featuring Sammy and a selection of guests answering the question "What happened to PHP 6?". Sammy is joined by Sara Golemon, Derick Rethans, Sean Coates and Andrei Zmievski - all core developers (at one time or another) who played a part in the language around the time "PHP 6" was in the works.

Despite the fact that there was never an official release of PHP 6, it was going to be a real thing with a lot of great improvements to the engine and language. But why was this version of PHP never released? We talk with some previous and current internals developers to hear the story of what happened to PHP 6.

You can catch this latest episode either though the video (in-page or on YouTube) or you can use the in-page audio player to just listen in. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates of when new shows are released.

The Ibuildings techPortal has published the latest episode in their Dutch PHP Conference series of recordings - Andrei Zmievski's talk All the Little Pieces: Distributed systems with PHP.

Quick, what do memcache, MogileFS, and Gearman have in common? They are scalable, distributed technologies, and they can also interface with PHP, your ubiquitous Web development language. Digg uses all 3 (and a few more) in its quest for social news domination, and this session will share much of what we’ve learned about them and how they are best utilized with PHP.

You can either listen to this latest episode on the in-page player or you can download it directly. If you'd like to follow along with the slides, you can find them here.

As a part of the Please Start From The Beginning video series, Andrei Zmievski was interviewed about how he got into web development and PHP.

Please Start From The Beginning is a video series that explores the career paths and experiences of web industry professionals. I was honored to be interviewed for the series along with such interesting people as Eric Meyer, Joe Stump, and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Here's the summary from this episode:

Andrei Zmievski is a web developer and founding member of Analog, prior to this he was Open Source Fellow at Digg and a platform engineer at Yahoo. Andrei is also a core developer of PHP and a member of the PHP Group.

If you're on the fence about coming to this year's php|tek conference, you might want to check out these three things Marci Tabini has mentioned that will be happening this year.

February is usually when the many fun and interesting activities that surround our spring conference php|tek start taking place - and this year is no exception. In fact, this year that are more people working - hellbent might be a better word, given their enthusiasm - on making |tek a memorable occasion for PHP developers from all over the world to meet up, learn and network.

The three events/happenings he mentions are the keynote being given by Andrei Zmievski (Open Source Fellow at Digg), the webcast/unconference being organized by Keith Casey and the Hackathon being put together by Matthew Turland (both of Blue Parabola).

You can get more information on what sort of talks will be happening and how you can reserve your spot on the main conference website.

The folks over at php|architect have three great annoucnements about their upcoming php|tek 2009 conference - a keynote, the Hackathon and news for the late early-birds.

Here's a few more specifics:

• The newly announced keynote will be a talk from Andrei Zmievski (recently appointed Open Source Fellow at digg and will talk about PHP6
• The Hackathon has been officially announced in conjunction with the Unconference
• And, for those that thought they had missed out on the early-bird pricing for the event - listen up! They've extended the early-bird pricing out until February 28th!

You can get more information about the php|tek conference for 2009 (including registering to reserve your spot) on official conference website

Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

As mentioned on Sara Goleman's blog today:

Incontestably the driving force behind PHP6 [...] Andrei Zmievski will be taking off for San Francisco to join a fresh young startup. Andrei's been a pivotal member of the PHP community for the majority of it's life.

As far as she knows, though, he's not moving away from working so heavily with PHP and the development group, but his employment move and setup time at the new company could cause a bit of downtime.

As mentioned on Sara Goleman's blog today:

Incontestably the driving force behind PHP6 [...] Andrei Zmievski will be taking off for San Francisco to join a fresh young startup. Andrei's been a pivotal member of the PHP community for the majority of it's life.

As far as she knows, though, he's not moving away from working so heavily with PHP and the development group, but his employment move and setup time at the new company could cause a bit of downtime.