In this recent post to his blog Ian Barber offers up some hints on presenting at conferences (or other events really) based on some of his experiences at this year's PHP Benelux Conference that just wrapped up in Belgium.

Some of the conversations I had during the weekend were around technical presenting at conferences and usergroups, so I thought I'd collect a handful of the tips that were discussed into a post, and use a few of my favourite speakers at the event to illustrate them.

He has it broken up by speaker, first David Zülke, Rowan Merewood and David Coallier, each with their own highlights of what they did well in their presentations. The list includes:

• Make concepts concrete with examples and demos
• Care About The Visuals
• Project Confidence
• Engage The Audience

Ian provides summaries for each of the points, describing what the speaker did to accomplish it and how it could be put into practice by other presenters.

Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his blog today about the Microsoft Hackathon happening at this year's PHPBenelux conference with reps from Microsoft in attendance.

Even if you have no knowledge of any of Microsoft's PHP solutions you're more then happy to join us and see how you can build applications so they can be distributed with the Microsoft IIS infrastructures.

Whatever your reason, you can find out more about the conference and the hackathon over on the PHPBenelux website and pick up your tickets now (300 Euro for the full event, just 160 Euro for a partial ticket).

The PHP Belenux conference has officially announced their Call for Papers for their event happening in January 2012 in Antwerp.

With the kickoff of the conference site we are also opening the call for proposals (CFP), this is where you get to step up and take the stage. If you have any cool subject related to PHP which you would like to talk about, please fill out the CfP which will run from September 1st and closes on October 15th.

Speakers will receive a package including a hotel stay, travel reimbursement, meals, drinks and, of course, full access to the conference. You can submit sessions lasting either 50 minutes (talk) or 3 hours (tutorial) with a few guidelines and suggestions to follow. Topics they're interested in (but not limited to) include CMSes, cloud computing, NoSQL, frameworks, best practices and HTML5. Remember, the last day for submissions is October 15th so get busy submitting - there's no limit to how many you can enter!