This year's PHPNW conference is bringing back the tutorial day for this year's event, giving you access to hands-on sessions from several well-known people in the PHP community on a wide range of topics.

Have you ever been to a conference talk and wished the speaker could come and spend time with you to really explore the real ‘nitty-gritty’ of the topic? Well so have we, and that’s why following last years success, PHPNW are again offering you this exceptional opportunity in the form of a tutorial day which will kick off the whole conference weekend.

This year's sessions include:

• Lorna Mitchell's Tools of the Trade
• Derick Rethans's Hands on Debugging with XDebug
• Stuart Herbert's Scaling Your Team with Hubflow

This year's event is happening October 5th, 6th and 7th in Manchester, UK with the Tutorial sessions being the first of the three days. You can find out more about the event (and tutorials) on the main conference site. Ticket sales are also open and Early Bird pricing is in effect until September 4th, so hurry to get in on this great price!

In this new post to her site, Lorna Mitchell shares some other skills/technologies that are "allied to PHP" and can make you a more effective (and better) developer for knowing them.

In web development, our biggest challenges are not writing code, we can do that. But getting the code safely from one place to another, with many people's work preserved, having our platform(s) correctly configured and understanding how to use them, making use of the tools in the ecosystem which will help us improve the quality of our code; these are the big challenges we face, and that's why I proposed this workshop and why I think all these topics are important.

Among the things she'll be talking about are useful things to know like effective use of version control, using a static analysis tool to evaluate your code and performance profiling. If you'd like to attend the talk and hear it all first-hand, you can find out more about PHPNW 2012 from their site.