Rafael Dohms has a new post to his blog about some of the lessons he learned attending this year's PHP Benelux conference both from the perspective of attending the conference and having been at several conferences around the world.

After hearing about how great PHP Benelux Conferences were I finally made it over to Belgium to check it out, and i was impressed. To catch you up on the new, I moved to Amsterdam last december and thus had the chance of attending the conference which is now 2 hours away on a train ride. I could not expect less of a wonderful conference when names like Michelangelo van Dam are involved and this was no exception.

Among his suggestions, there's things like:

• Value your sponsors
• Value your attendees
• Make your attendees pay
• Value the organizers and your volunteers

...and one of the most important ones: "Have Fun!" If you're not following this piece of advice, you're probably doing it wrong.

The PHPBenelux conference has officially announced their list of speakers for their 2012 event (January 27th and 28th in Antwerp):

We are happy and proud to announce the speaker line-up for the 2012 edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. We already released our tutorials on November 16th, but this is the real deal. Speaker bio’s, talk abstracts and schedule will be added later. Please note that this list is subject to change.

Sessions for this year's event include:

• Tobias Schlitt: Writing testable code
• Sebastian Marek: Magic Behind the Numbers – Software Metrics In Practice
• Nick Belhomme: PHP traits, treat or threat?
• Jordi Boggiano: Redis – Your advanced in-memory key-value store
• Stephan Hochdörfer: The state of DI in PHP
• Craig Kitterman: Enterprise Class Cloud for the Average Joe

Tickets are still at their Early Bird prices (but only until December 16th!) and you can get a pass for both the tutorial day and main conference day for just 260 Euro. If you just want to attend the conference, that ticket is only 135 Euro. You can order them here. If you want to attend one of the tutorials, you'll need to specify that by ordering the related ticket.

As is mentioned on Michelangelo van Dam's blog, the PHPBenelux conference for 2012 has been announced and tickets are now on sale.

The PHPBenelux team only announced the names of tutorial speakers, but with names like Ivo Jansch, Torsten Rhinne, Fabien Potencier and Matthew Weier O'Phinney you know it's going to rock! And that's tutorials only. It's all happening on January 27 and 28, so make sure you block those days in your calendar, because the center of Europe is going to buzz PHP like it never had before!

The tickets can be purchased here for the Early Bird rates (until December 16th) of 260 Euro for the full event (conference+tutorials) and 135 Euro for just the conference.