Brandon Savage has posted some ideas about making conferences better and how they can appeal to a wider (and maybe more inexperienced) level of developer.

I love PHP conferences. I attended a lot of PHP conferences when I was a brand new developer. Zendcon, OSCON, php[tek], Wordcamp Baltimore, DC PHP and others were my stomping grounds. I learned a lot, and the conferences I attended were on the whole useful, beneficial and wonderful experiences. But I also felt challenged by the fact that conferences don’t offer much for bringing up new developers with concrete information and training. This isn’t necessarily the fault of conferences: it’s impossible to truly impart a useful skill into a developer with only a 45 minute talk.

He includes four ideas in the post and talks some about the role of training at the events:

• Are conferences even the right place for training?
• Creating Different Tracks of Different Lengths
• Including Hands-On Training During Tutorial Days
• Offer Learning-Focused Hackathons

He also notes that some of it is up to the developers to find a good fit for what they need and the skills they're looking to learn. There's other options out there besides just the usual conferences, too and, as Brandon states, "investing in your career is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself."

Chris Jones has posted a wrapup of day one at this year's OpenWorld happening in San Francisco. This first day included the hands-on PHP sessions open to anyone that wanted to come experience the combination of this powerful language and database firsthand.

The PHP Hands-On-Labs went smoothly today. What a pleasant feeling! There was great interest - all but two seats had been pre-booked for the first lab - and lots of studious work done.

He gives thanks to the people that helped out and mentions some issues they had with some of the PHP demonstrations there at the booth. He mentions Levi Dixon and Nicholas Tang's talk called Building and Deploying Web-Scale Social Networking Applications, Using PHP and Oracle Database coming Tuesday and a paper that might be useful to PHP developers using Oracle - Best Practices for Developing Performant Applications for Oracle Database 11g.

If you're going to be attending this year's OpenWorld, be sure to check out the hands-on sessions they'll have to how to develop web applications with the powerful database as a backend.

The labs pack a lot into their respective slots, and I think you'll be very happy with them. The first lab is an introduction to PHP and the OCI8 extension. This is a new and improved version of the lab we ran last year. The second lab is a brand new course. It looks at more of the technologies used to build PHP Web apps - connection pooling, AJAX, debugging and frameworks.

These labs are happening on Sunday the 21st, the first day of the conference, so you'll need be sure to make plans to make it over there to catch them.