The ZFort.com site has posted their latest PHP Digest for November 1st through 19th of 2017 - Digest #9. The post includes happenings in the language, community and spotlights various packages. Items in this latest digest include:

• the PHP Version Statistics 2017.02 Edition
• the RFC to allow trailing commas in function calls
• the collinodell/json5 package
• the tutorial covering deployment of PHP applications with Deployer

There's lots more mentioned in this latest digest so be sure to check out the full post for more packages, events and a list of learning materials for your framework of choice.

The Symfony Finland site has a new post with a brief look at how the adoption rate of Symfony Flex has picked up with the impending release of Symfony 4 coming next month (November 2017).

With Symfony 4.0 a new standard structure for building applications is being adopted. This is known as Symfony Flex and will be the preferred way of creating applications. Symfony 4.0 is scheduled for release in November 2017, but many projects have already started adopting the new structure.

[...] In six years a lot of things have changed in the web development world, with the rise of front end driven applications, containerised microservices and more. [...] One thing that has not changed for some time is the Standard Edition itself. It has been critiqued for being enterprisey and heavy on configuration. [...] The trend was noticed by the team and in December 2016 at the SymfonyCon Berlin Symfony Flex was announced.

The post also lists out some of the projects that are already embracing Symfony Flex in their project structure including the GraphQL bundle and the PhpStorm Symfony plugin. Symfony Flex also gives developers a way to more immediately work with Symfony 4 when it is released through the same methods as now (with the 3.3 components).

On the Symfony blog they've made the announcement about the Symfony November Camp happening in Sweden (back for their second time) November 14th in Stockholm.

As an organizer of the Swedish Symfony community I’m happy to say that we are hosting our second Symfony Conference. It is a one-day, single-track conference with speakers from 6 countries. The event takes place in Stockholm on November 14th. We will have two workshops the day before the event with Matthias Noback and Magnus Nordlander. One is a workshop on getting started with Symfony, and the other is for advanced Symfony application architecture. Both of our workshops are small groups, to ensure that you'll have plenty of access to the trainer.

They have a great list of speakers lined up for the day's event including Matthias Noback, Mathias Verraes and Raul Fraile. Tickets for the conference itself are 109 Euro and the training is 439 Euro. You can find out more about the event and pick up tickets on the November Camp website.

The Nomad PHP (virtual) user group has announced their speaker for the November 2013 meeting - Ed Finkler talking about the problems that come with having "more code" in your applications.

In this talk I’ll extend the concepts to other languages we work with in web development, establishing these core principles: Learn languages, not frameworks, build small things, less code is better than more, and create and use simple, readable code We’ll cover how following these principles makes you a better developer, and makes the job of maintaining and verifying your code much easier.

The meeting is on November 14th and you'll have to sign up if you'd like to attend. There's a $10 USD cost for a ticket and you can purchase them right up until the event.

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.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their November meeting - Brian Moon talking about "The Magical World of Gearman":

Gearman is a simple and robust tool for distributing asynchronous or offline work across a large number of worker boxes. Gearman will let you run a simple asynchronous task in only a few lines of code (and in many languages). This talk will focus on what Gearman is, some use cases for it, and how you can quickly start using it with PHP.

The meeting is being held at Thompson Technologies Thursday, November 1st from 7-9pm. A mini-talk from Scott Lively about PHP_CodeSniffer will also be given.

Have an upcoming user group meeting you'd like announced? let us know!

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's the announcement of their latest Bug Hunt Day for the Zend Framework happening the 18th through the 20th of November (this Thursday through Saturday).

For those who haven't put the reoccurring event in their calendar, this announcement is for you: Zend Framework Monthly Bug-hunt is here again! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday of November (the 18th, 19th and 20th 2010), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework.

This bug hunt is a particularly important one since they've released the final release branch for the 1.x series. They want things to be "rock solid" and are encouraging even more testers to come and help out. To help out, you'll need a CLA on file and you can read their guide on how to get started.

Daniel Cousineau has written up some timely advice in a new post to his blog. It looks at pinpointing the time boundary for Daylight Savings Time in a PHP script (when it starts and when it ends).

I had an issue recently where I needed to calculate the Unix timestamp for the daylight savings time boundaries. According to the United States Naval Observatory, daylight savings time begins the Second Sunday of March and ends on the First Sunday of November.

He looks at using the strtotime function to calculate these dates but points out some quirks - like what happens when you just give it a month or something like "second Sunday". His solution was to go back one day ("March 0" instead of "March 1") and calculating the time from there, including that first full day of March in the calculation.

The PHPNW group has officially posted their Call for Papers today for the upcoming conference (being held in Manchester):

phpnw08 will take place on Saturday 22nd November 2008 at Manchester Central Exhibition Centre. phpnw08 is organised by developers for developers and is the perfect opportunity to learn, network and mix with peers and industry leaders, as well as discover the latest tricks, techniques and innovations in PHP and internet development. The conference will have a mix of in-depth and shorter talks.

If you're interested in presenting, you'll need to submit an abstract that's between 250-500 words like and would last about 55 minutes presented normally. Shorter talks should be about 25 minutes with some time for Q&A after. Submit your proposal via the form to be considered. The final day for submissions is Septemper 21st and accepted papers will be notified by September 29th.

The DynamicWebPages.de site has mentioned details about the latest PHP World Kongress conference happening in Munich later this year (November 24th and 25th).

The PHP World congress offers on the first day three Workshops, per to one to the Zend Framework, eZ Components as well as Flow3, which Framework, on which in the future Typo3 will be based. [...] The second day focuses on "PHP in the Enterprise".

Speakers like Tobias Schlitt and Christian Wenz will be presenting. The attendance fee starts at about 490 Euro - check out the official site for more information on registration and the official schedule.