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.

Lukas Smith has formally kicked off a restart of the PDO (PHP Data Objects) abstraction layer, trying to get interest back into this part of the PHP project and get developers back into patching and creating more features on it as a whole.

The problem with PDO's current state is that there are just so many bugs open that it seems like a maintain. Plus the original creator(s) are busy with other things, which means the learning curve is steep. Which makes it all the more important that we both have new guys as well as experienced core developers on this. I think for too long we have waited for RDBMS vendors to bring in the momentum. However since we decided to not play according to the "rules" they have proposed, its obviously our job and not theirs.

He asks that all that are interested in closing out those bugs and really getting the development of PDO back on track sign up for the mailing list and check out the brainstorming page on the PHP wiki on general ideas and thoughts on where the project should be headed.

Feel like getting involved with a PHP-based Open Source project, but don't know where to start you might consider getting involved with the Doctrine project - they're currently looking for a few good programmers.

Many of you probably know Jonathan, Guilherme and Roman as being the core developers of the Doctrine project over the past 2 years. While this constancy is a good thing it's also problematic. [...] So we are left wondering. What can we do differently to get more people involved? Given the amount of users and noise about Doctrine around the PHP scene, we find the absence of new contributors quite strange

The Doctrine project is looking for developers (on both the 1.x and 2.x release series) to either get involved of to help them out with suggestions on how to get others interested in working with the project. To get in contact with the team, you can just send an email to any one of the three: jonwage [at] gmail [dot] com (Jonathan), r.borschel [at] gmx [dot] net (Roman) or guilhermeblanco [at] gmail [dot] com (Guilherme).

Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".

I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.

He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).

He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.

Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".

I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.

He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).

He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll (which features a PHP editor should have) on their site today.

Options included checking PHP syntax with one click, having a complete PHP reference inside, and bookmarking for easy code navigation. The one that was at the top, though, was the need to make finding classes and functions in documents quick and easy (with a resounding 46.9 percent). The runner up was down at 18.8 percent - "Navigate to errors in your code code automatically".

Be sure to check out this week's poll question too. They want to know which of the following is the category of PHP that most interests you:

• General PHP
• PHP & Business / Integration
• PHP & Databases
• PHP Design
• PHP Extensions
• PHP & XML
• PHP-GTK
• PHP Security

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll (which features a PHP editor should have) on their site today.

Options included checking PHP syntax with one click, having a complete PHP reference inside, and bookmarking for easy code navigation. The one that was at the top, though, was the need to make finding classes and functions in documents quick and easy (with a resounding 46.9 percent). The runner up was down at 18.8 percent - "Navigate to errors in your code code automatically".

Be sure to check out this week's poll question too. They want to know which of the following is the category of PHP that most interests you:

• General PHP
• PHP & Business / Integration
• PHP & Databases
• PHP Design
• PHP Extensions
• PHP & XML
• PHP-GTK
• PHP Security