The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted helping those Sculpin users out there get the most from their site with some helpful customization tips. Sculpin is a PHP-based static site generation tool that converts Mardon files and Twig templates into HTML documents ready for use.

If you’re a PHP developer and currently running a blog with a static site generator such as Octopress or Jekyll, wouldn’t it be great if you could use your primary language for it? Yes, it’s healthy for us developers to use more than one language, but let’s be honest – we often want to add some functionality to our blogs, but it’s difficult to accomplish in unfamiliar syntax. In this article, we’ll set up Sculpin, a static site generator for PHP. Just like any other static site generator, it uses markdown files and HTML templates to generate your blog, so the transition should be easy.

The tutorial starts by helping you get Sculpin installed (as a phar executable) and move it to where it's globally accessible. With that installed the article then helps you make a simple blog, customize some of the basic settings and start in on a new blog post. With that in place it then gets into the customization, adding in:

• syntax highlighting
• Disqus commenting
• blog archive links

The post finishes up showing you how to deploy the resulting blog into a GitHub pages repository and pushing them out for public consumption.

The ConFoo conference has announced that their Call for Papers has been extended until September 16th for this years event happening February 29th through March 2nd.

Many of you are just back from vacation. because of that, we decided to extend the call for papers until September 16. For speakers, that means more time to prepare abstracts. For everyone else, it's more time to read the proposals and cast your vote.

You can find out more information about the ConFoo Call for Papers in their site. They're looking for topics ranging from Java, Ruby and Javascript out to Web Standards, Project Management and Agile methods. If you'd like to submit papers, you can head to their submission form or you can rate other proposals.

As is noted on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Call for Papers has been extended for this year's Zend/PHP Conference by another week. The deadline's now May 17th.

Due to comments on the originally short time-frame allowed for the CFP, we have extended the deadline to May 17th to allow a more reasonable time for submissions. We have also clarified the speaker expenses in the updated text below.

The post also gives a bit more detail than before on how the speakers are compensated for this year's event. If you'd like to submit your ideas, head to the submissions page and enter as many as you'd like!

In his latest post, Sebastian Bergmann shares some information about an extension for the Reflection API included in PHP 5.

The Extended Reflection API enhances PHP 5 by providing access to type information and annotations that are embedded as doc-comments into the sourcecode.

Processable additions to the source code enable a wide range of new applications in general, and Web Services and Aspect-Oriented Programming in particular.

The wiki page for the project shares the difference between the two, including graphics to help show how they tie in together. There's even some pseudo code to get you started with the different class types, a mapping out of the API.

In his latest post, Sebastian Bergmann shares some information about an extension for the Reflection API included in PHP 5.

The Extended Reflection API enhances PHP 5 by providing access to type information and annotations that are embedded as doc-comments into the sourcecode.

Processable additions to the source code enable a wide range of new applications in general, and Web Services and Aspect-Oriented Programming in particular.

The wiki page for the project shares the difference between the two, including graphics to help show how they tie in together. There's even some pseudo code to get you started with the different class types, a mapping out of the API.