The Laravel News site has published an interview with one of the speakers for the upcoming Laracon EU Conference, happening at the end of this month (August 2016). In the interview they talk with well-known Laravel-er Freek Van der Herten.

This year’s Laracon EU has a fantastic speaker lineup including twenty-two speakers from all across the world. Tickets are still available and it’s one you will not want to miss.

Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) is one of those speakers and he graciously took a break from releasing new packages to allow me the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his talk and the conference experience.

Freek answers questions about his previous experience at Laracon EU, his Laravel-related backup package, other talks he's excited about and words of encouragement to those attending the conference. Check out the full post for his answers to these and other questions.

The Symfony blog has a reminder for those in the Warsaw, Poland area - save the dates of December 10th through the 14th for this year's SymfonyCon Warsaw.

We’re very happy to announce the first SymfonyCon! It will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from December 10th to 14th. Get ready for this upcoming conference! But okay, the SymfonyCon is probably confusing you all, so it’s time for a little recap of all the conferences we’re organizing all over the world. Thus, starting from this year, the Symfony Live conferences will be now local events, which means that they will be organized for the Symfony Community of the host country. [...] nd here comes the SymfonyCon, which will be an international conference. [...] he first one we’re organizing will be held in Europe, and we’ve chosen Warsaw to organize it!

The conference will be at the Westin hotel with two workshop days and, two days of conference sessions followed by a day of hacking/certification exams. If you want to submit, the Call for Papers is now open until July 31st or you can pick up your early bird tickets for just 199 Euro.

If you weren't able to make it to the Symfony Live Paris event, you're in luck - they've just posted the videos from the sessions presented in the main room of the conference (including keynotes).

The 2011 edition of the Symfony Live conference in Paris was a blast. With 540 attendees, this was the biggest Symfony conference ever. [...] This year, we also had a video team in the main room which recorded all the sessions. So, thanks to Brainsonic, I'm really happy to announce to all the people who missed the conference that all sessions from the main room are now available online.

Included in the list of videos are sessions like:

• Josh Holmes' The Lost Art of Simplicity
• Tom Boutell's Apostrophe: a Symfony-powered CMS your clients will love
• Fabien Potencier's HTTP Cache
• Stefan Koopmanschap's Don't Use a Screw when You Need a Nail

While not specifically about deploying PHP applications, Ian Barber's talk at the recent ThinkVitamin Code Management and Deployment Conference is packed full of good tips you can use in your web application deployment. He talks about everything from version control strategies, continuous integration, remote releases, package management, hotfixes and one of the most difficult things to do - rollback.

Still deploying sites and updates manually via FTP? This session will cover a number of automated deployment methods, best practice workflow for updating sites and fixing bugs, along with how to use staging servers, deploying to multiple machines, zips tars & scripts, packaged releases hotfixes, database changes, rollbacks and more.

There's tons of technologies mentioned, so you'd be better off going through his slides and taking your own notes. Unfortunately, a recording of the session isn't currently publicly available, but the slides are an excellent resource for those currently looking to better their overall deployment process.

An announcement has been made about an new entry into the PHP community world - the PHP Community Conference happening in Nashville, TN (April 21st and 22nd):

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. Ticket sales will begin on February 3, 2011.

Their Call for Papers is already open and will stay open until January 31st - less than 20 days away! They're looking for topics that focus less of the technical how-to you might find at other conferences and more on the "real world" happenings and projects the PHP community is working on. Speakers will have airfare and hotel costs paid for. To submit a proposal, send it in an email over to proposals@phpcon.org today!

Following the announcement of this year's unconference at the Zend/PHP Conference, Michelangelo Van Dam has posted some of his thoughts about being the one running the show this year.

Yes, there's going to be unconference (uncon) sessions at ZendCon 2010 ! I was chosen to run these very interesting, educative and as-equally high-valued parallel sessions at the PHP conference in Santa-Clara, CA. [...] I'm looking forward being your host for the ZendCon unconference and I hope I can achieve the same passion and quality as Keith "Mr. Uncon" Casey (@CaseySoftware) had done in the past years.

The Zend/PHP Conference will be happening November 1st through 4th in Santa Clara, California and will be hosting nine different tracks of sessions including ones on lifecycle best practices, server operations, architecture and design and the Zend Framework.

Both Sara Golemon and Christopher Jones are attending this year's php|works conference and have posted their own "first day summaries" of their experiences so far.

From Sara:

Day one's of php|works is over and as usual, I have nothing but good things to say about this php|architect presentation. [...] My tutorial, PHP Extension Writing, was next in the Paris room (after lunch), and it went off a little better than I'd feared and I managed to give out three copies of my book as attendance/participation prizes.

And from Christopher:

The great thing about staying in the conference hotel is that you can roll out of bed at 5:30am body-clock time and still make it to the first session 30 minutes later with time to grab a complimentary pastry. [...] After [Paul Reinheimer's YUI] session I took a few moments to verify my notebook drives the projector - all fine once the projector picked up my screen resolution. [...] Now I'm back in my room, trying to polish up my second talk - the new one - so that I can spend the evenings talking properly with PHP users and developers.

These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg for what the two shared, so be sure to check out their full posts to get their perspective on the conference. Also keep an eye out for more great summaries to be posted here to get other developers' thoughts and happenings during this two-day conference.

Both Sara Golemon and Christopher Jones are attending this year's php|works conference and have posted their own "first day summaries" of their experiences so far.

From Sara:

Day one's of php|works is over and as usual, I have nothing but good things to say about this php|architect presentation. [...] My tutorial, PHP Extension Writing, was next in the Paris room (after lunch), and it went off a little better than I'd feared and I managed to give out three copies of my book as attendance/participation prizes.

And from Christopher:

The great thing about staying in the conference hotel is that you can roll out of bed at 5:30am body-clock time and still make it to the first session 30 minutes later with time to grab a complimentary pastry. [...] After [Paul Reinheimer's YUI] session I took a few moments to verify my notebook drives the projector - all fine once the projector picked up my screen resolution. [...] Now I'm back in my room, trying to polish up my second talk - the new one - so that I can spend the evenings talking properly with PHP users and developers.

These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg for what the two shared, so be sure to check out their full posts to get their perspective on the conference. Also keep an eye out for more great summaries to be posted here to get other developers' thoughts and happenings during this two-day conference.

Stefan Koopmanschap pointed us towards some information for an upcoming Symfony-related event - SymfonyCamp, happening September 6th through the 8th at the Dutch Open Projects office.

SymfonyCamp is an event for the true fan of the symfony framework, or for those who want to learn more about this PHP5 MVC web application framework. During the business day, the power of open source for the enterprise will be the main theme, with symfony taking a central role. During the technology days, developers can geek out during sessions on a variety of topics, with a separate beginner track and a separate expert track depending on your symfony skill level.

If you sign up before August 17th, you'll get the early bird price of 100 Euro. After that, it's a 150 registration charge. This includes the location, the talks and a copy of your very own of "The Definitive Guide To Symfony" from APress.

Check out the conference website for the full details on this great three-day event.

Stefan Koopmanschap pointed us towards some information for an upcoming Symfony-related event - SymfonyCamp, happening September 6th through the 8th at the Dutch Open Projects office.

SymfonyCamp is an event for the true fan of the symfony framework, or for those who want to learn more about this PHP5 MVC web application framework. During the business day, the power of open source for the enterprise will be the main theme, with symfony taking a central role. During the technology days, developers can geek out during sessions on a variety of topics, with a separate beginner track and a separate expert track depending on your symfony skill level.

If you sign up before August 17th, you'll get the early bird price of 100 Euro. After that, it's a 150 registration charge. This includes the location, the talks and a copy of your very own of "The Definitive Guide To Symfony" from APress.

Check out the conference website for the full details on this great three-day event.