The Laravel News site has a new post today sharing the full schedule announcement for this year's Laracon conference (happing in Louisville, Kentucky July 27th through the 29th).

Laracon just announced the preliminary schedule for this year’s conference. Just as in the past, it leaves ample time for hanging out and meeting others interested in the framework.

Sessions for this year's conference include:

• "Test Driven Laravel" (Adam Wathan)
• "Servers For Hackers" (Chris Fidao)
• "PHP 7" (Zeev Suraski)
• "Tests Should Tell A Story" (Matthew Machuga)
• "YAGNI With Laravel" (Jason McCreary)
• "Lumen, Guzzle, & Swagger" (Jeremy Lindblom)

You can find more information about the conference and pick up tickets from the main conference website. There are discounts available for groups of 3 or more too.

The Laravel News site has a post talking about a new Laravel-related conference happening in London on July 9th and 10th (at the Barbican): ArtisanConf, "the premier UK conference for Laravel and modern PHP enthusiasts. Up to 300 artisans will convene in the heart of London’s Tech City for two days of inspirational talks, engaging networking and amazing learning opportunities."

Jonty Behr is one of the organizers of ArtisanConf, and I asked him why he decided to start this new conference. “Laravel is incredibly popular in the UK, and a lot of developers have been requesting a UK based conference for a while. Although the guys at LaraconEU do an amazing job, not all developers in the UK are able to travel to Amsterdam and we hope to help, educate and build their experience within the community.”

The conference already has some amazing (and well known) speakers lined up. Plus they are hoping that there will be something for both beginners and the experienced at ArtisanConf. There will be two full days of talks and more details will be released soon.

You can already pick up tickets from the conference site or, if you'd like a chance at speaking, head over and submit to their Call for Papers.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted about an up coming CakePHP-related event - this year's CakeFest (to be held in Berlin).

I will make this short. The 3rd and so far biggest CakeFest will be held in Berlin, home of Debuggable! From July 9-12, people from all over Europe and the rest of the world will travel to Germany in order to celebrate and learn about the best PHP framework there is.

The even is broken into two parts - the workshop portion (July 9th and 10th) and the actual conference (July 11th and 12th). You can find out more information about the conference at its web site (including registering and reserving your spot!)

Lorna Mitchell has posted some great news about the article contest that the PHP Women are running - prizes!

The article contest running on PHPWomen.org through July just got more exciting. We have asked people to post entries to our Best Practices forum. The authors of the best two entries will win copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Besides the possibility of winning one of these licenses, entrants will also be entered into the running (two winners) to get a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro Magazine and have the opportunity for their article to be featured on the magazine's website.

To all our American readers out there, whether you're really celebrating your independence, or just enjoying the day off work with a chance to play with pyrotechnics (like myself!), all of us here at PHPDeveloper.org wish you a Happy and Safe 4th of July.

To all our American readers out there, whether you're really celebrating your independence, or just enjoying the day off work with a chance to play with pyrotechnics (like myself!), all of us here at PHPDeveloper.org wish you a Happy and Safe 4th of July.

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference for this year is getting closer and closer, and a few of the members of the PHP community have been selected to present their proposed talks for this year's edition.

The list so far includes:

• David Sklar on web application dependencies
• Adam Trachtenberg giving his talk on the "Dirty secrets of PHP 5's ext/soap extension"
• Chris Shiflett (along with Geoff Young) covering PHP testing, including mentions of Apache-Test, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and phpt

For more details or to sign up for the conference, visit their site and check out the long list of topics and tracks for this year's event.

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference for this year is getting closer and closer, and a few of the members of the PHP community have been selected to present their proposed talks for this year's edition.

The list so far includes:

• David Sklar on web application dependencies
• Adam Trachtenberg giving his talk on the "Dirty secrets of PHP 5's ext/soap extension"
• Chris Shiflett (along with Geoff Young) covering PHP testing, including mentions of Apache-Test, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and phpt

For more details or to sign up for the conference, visit their site and check out the long list of topics and tracks for this year's event.