With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) deadline looming on the horizon, there's no better time to make your applications compliant. Christoph Rumpel, a development lead on the Laravel-based Botman chatbot software, as posted a guide to help you ensure your chatbots are compliant.

Only one month left until the GDPR will take effect and people are already freaking out. If you haven't made yourself familiar with this topic, you need to do it now! This article will give you a summary of what you need to know and provide you with steps to make your chatbots GDPR compliant.

His article starts with a brief definition of what GDPR is and what it impacts. He then goes through and lists out some of the key changes that will have to be made to be in compliance including:

• Increased Territorial Scope
• Consent
• Process Personal Data
• Documentation

With those basics out of the way, he gets into the application of them in chatbot software. To make it easier he's come up with a listing of eleven questions to ask or steps to take to get you closer to compliance. For each he briefly describes it and provides some screenshots of the output from the bot that would be compliant.

On the Evozon blog there's a post that provides "a brief reality check to developers about GDPR" and how it effects them and their applications. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a regulation passed in Europe that enforces certain requirements about personal data and how it should be handled.

If you`re reading this, it means you`ve already heard about it or you`re about to receive some flash-news: there`s a new all-encompassing data privacy regulation in the EU. Ready or not, 25th of May 2018, the date when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes effective, will wait for nobody. If there’s any buzz around it, it`s because of a good reason: businesses will have to comply, software will have to evolve.

While there is still some uncertainty around certain parts, the article goes through some things you can do to help you prepare and make your application compliant including:

• discovering and documenting the purpose of the data that is being collected
• providing clear notification of data collection for the user
• define retention periods and deletion policies
• tracing any changes that happen with the data

The article does a good job providing a "checklist" of sorts you can use to ensure you're compliant. Of course, it's by no means an actual method of compliance but it does provide a good list to guide you in the right direction.

On the Laravel News site today there's an announcement posted about the launch of the Laracon 2015 conference websites for both editions, in the United States and in Europe.

Today both the Laracon.us and Laracon.eu conference sites have been launched. Both sharing the same style of branding and logo. The US conference will be held in Kentucky on August 11-12, and the EU in Amsterdam on August 25-26. Early bird pricing is available for both and the speaker lineup will be announced at a later time.

The Early Bird tickets for each even come in at just a bit over $300 USD and no schedules have been posted, but that's a great price for either of these two-day events. Each site also has links to subscribe to a mailing list related to the event so you can get the latest updates as they're released.

Davey Shafik has a new post about doing the closing keynote at this year's ZendCon Europe conference (happening November 18th through 20th in Paris, France).

In a little under three weeks I will be giving the closing keynote at ZendCon Europe. This will my first keynote and I’m excited to be talking about The Evolution of DevOps.

His talk will cover how the DevOps role has come into its own over the past few years and what kinds of changes to expect, as a developer, in the upcoming years. If you'd like to hear this and lots of other great talks, there's still time to pick up your tickets for either just the conference or for both the conference and tutorials. You can even opt to take the Zend certification while you're at the event.

The 7PHP.com site has announced a giveaway of free tickets to this month's Nomad PHP virtual user group meeting, the European chapter. The topic for this month's EU meeting is authorization and authentication (disclaimer: I am the speaker).

Here I am again for another NomadPHP Ticket(s) give-away. Two tickets will be given away – to the 1st & 2nd draw winner! If you did not know, NomadPHP is virtual PHP User Group mainly for people who do not have the chance to avail of a local PHP user group. But it is open to ANYONE around the world. I also remind you that NomadPHP is an initiative brought forward by the icon of The PHP Community, namely ‘His Awesomeness’ Mr Cal Evans.

To enter the contest to win the tickets, you just make a comment on the post and he'll select the winners before the event. The meeting is Thursday, October 17th at 8pm CEST.

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.

Zend has officially announced that they will be presenting a "sister" conference to the one they already hold each year in California, this time in Europe - ZendCon Europe.

ZendCon PHP 2013 will be the place where European PHP professionals gather this fall. [...] Attend Europe's largest conference focusing on Enterprise PHP solutions, Frameworks, PHP Training and all things PHP. Meet the legends who created PHP and are partly responsible for what the WWW looks like today. Whether you wish to find a job, take PHP training, find a services company to help you, or just meet the greatest developer ecosystem ever -You are in the right place!

The event will be held in Paris, France on November 18th through the 20th at the Marriott Rive Gauche. Following the same pattern as the US version of the conference, the first day will be tutorials with regular sessions the following days. It's still pretty early on so there's no details about the Call for Papers or anything yet, but you can sign up for more information on the current conference site.

On the Liip blog Lukas Smith has posted a wrapup of the PHPUCEU (PHP Unconference Europe) and some of the sessions that made up the two day event.

So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. [...] This wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.

Presentations chosen and made at this year's unconference included:

• a talk about the PHPRC (PHP Content Repository)
• "Clean Puppet"
• Behavior Driven Development
• Agile documentation
• Hood.ie
• Symfony2 REST API
• NoSQL is Not the Answer

If you're interesting to see what the event was like, check out some of the photos they've posted to their site.

As is mentioned in this new post to the Symfony Blog, it's "time to start a new season" of Symfony-related events (both at other events and Symfony Live).

I'm so happy to announce to all of you Symfony folks, the super exciting Symfony Live year that is waiting for you! This time I promise, this is going to be "Great News" for all of you!

Events mentioned for this year (so far) are:

• The Symfony track at this year's SunshinePHP conference (happening next week!)
• The US edition of Symfony Live in Portland
• Three other Symfony Live events to happen in Eurpoe

The largest announcement, though, is the SymfonyCon Europe that will be new this year, an all Symfony conference to be held somewhere in Europe later in 2013.

If you're around the Manchester area (or will be in February) you should consider attending the PHP Unconference Europe 2011 happening February 19th and 20th.

For the past four years, a group of enthusiasts have been organizing an unconference about PHP and related web technologies in Hamburg, Germany. What started off as a gathering of only fifty people, has grown over the course of three years into an event, which has received much following and attention within the German speaking PHP community. [...] The mission of PHP Unconference Europe is to bring together an international group of around 200 people, who have detailed knowledge of PHP and related web technologies.

For 2011, they've set up the European unconference to provide a whole new group of those with tech-related interests to come together and present the topics they want to hear about. Contribution ideas can be made via their Contribution System. Topics already suggested cover topics like Phing, document generation with the Zend Framework, project management and working with spreadsheets in PHP.

The tickets are already on sale, so if you'd like to attend, pick yours up and reserve your spot today! The cost is £40/46 Euro for the two day event.