On the Twilio blog today Sylvan Ash has written up a tutorial showing how to send SMS reminders from a Symfony application as reminders of certain events.

If you have a booking system, making appointments such as massage or other therapist bookings, dental or medical appointments, etc., you’d probably like to remind the client about the booking they made on the day of the appointment. In some cases, you might also want to remind the person offering the service. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send SMS reminders to clients of their upcoming massage appointments, at a designated time before the appointment, in a Symfony project using Twilio's SMS service.

The tutorial starts with a brief description of the setup and uses Composer to create a new Symfony project (the "Appointments" application). It then moves on to the models, defining the structure for the User and Appointment entities. It also shows how to make use of the seeding functionality to create several default users. Next up comes the Twilio integration: installing the SDK via Composer, defining the configuration and adding the client as a service.

With all of that set up, the final pieces are shown: the command to send the SMS messages via the Twilio service and the cron job to run it once a day at midnight.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a reminder about the Early Bird registration deadline for the 2018 edition of the Laracon Online conference.

As the year comes to a close, remember that for the next 23 days, you can still buy tickets to Laracon Online 2018 for $12 (regularly $25). Tickets will go up to $25 on January 3rd, which is still a great deal for the all-star speaker lineup planned. Grab tickets today before the busy rush of the holiday and new year.

Tickets are only $12 USD at the Early Bird pricing and the conference will be happening February 7th, 2018 beginning at 10am. Speakers include several of the Laravel regulars like Adam Wathan, Chris Fado, Matt Stauffer and, of course, Taylor Otwell. You can find out more information about the conference and pick up tickets of your own at the Early Bird price (while it lasts) on the Laracon Online website.

The Zend Developer Zone site has posted an reminder about the Call for Papers for ZendCon 2017 happening October 23rd through 26th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For the five of you who are living under a rock and haven’t heard, the dates for ZendCon 2017 have been announced and the ZendCon 2017 Call for Papers is open. [...] Join us in Vegas this October and be a part of one of the largest gatherings of the PHP community. Submit your talk to ZendCon 2017 today. (Submit at least 2 more tomorrow too!)

The post also shares a summary of the speaker's package provided for those selected to present at the event including a full conference pass, round-trip airfare and two hotel nights. The Call for Papers ends on April 14th - just one week from today - so get over there and submit those presentation ideas before time runs out!

A reminder from the Midwest PHP Conference has been posted today about the upcoming end of their Call for Papers for their 2016 event. The Midwest PHP Conference will be happening in Minneapolis, Minnesota March 4th and 5th. The CfP ends November 15th, just under a month from now.

We’re pleased to announce our conference, Midwest PHP should be one of the best PHP conferences where community members from around the world come together to learn and share information about the latest trends and technologies in professional PHP development. [...] We're committed to bringing together some of the best speakers from all around the world to share their knowledge with you here. We provide a travel and accommodation package to all selected speakers to help make this possible.

Other amenities in the speaker package include a free pass to the conference, airfare/travel to the event, two hotel nights and pickup service at the airport. They strongly encourage more than one submission as it does give them more to select from and some that may fit better into the schedule than others. You can go over to the Call for Papers site to submit those proposals now or the main conference site to find out more about the event.

As the conference season for next year gets closer, several conferences have opened their Call for Papers. A few of them have deadlines coming up soon, so don't forget the following important dates if you'd like to submit!

• php|tek 2012 - ends December 31st, 2011 (tomorrow!)
• Dutch PHP Conference - ends January 31st, 2012
• phpDay Italy - ends February 28th, 2012

Be sure to submit while there's still time! Thanks to Thijs Feryn for the reminder!

As a reminder to all of those out there wanting to attend this year's PHP Community Conference - it's only two weeks until the event, so you better register soon!

The PHP Community Conference is a two-day event. We kick things off with a tutorial day that will introduce you to tools and ideas that you can use in your code right away. The second day will consist of presentations that will inspire you to create something new with PHP.

The conference is happening April 21st and 22nd in Nashville, TN and tickets for the two-day event are $300 USD. There'll even be a Pecha Kucha event where two iPad2s will be given away. You can find out more about the schedule and the rest of the conference on the event's website.

On Qafoo.com there's a new tool that's been introduced to help you keep track of the current Call for Papers that are currently happening for PHP conferences. The start of the PHP conference season is in full swing, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Their Call for Papers Manager can keep that information at your fingertips.

The tool works quite simple: You can add CFPs you know about and which are relevant for the PHP community through a simple form. In order to remember the CFPs, you can configure two kinds of reminders: fFor upcoming CFPs and for ending CFPs. For each of these lists, you can determine when to be reminded, like 2 days before the event occurs. These lists can then be easily integrated into your normal feed reader using an RSS or Atom feed.

You can use the URL requested to get different kinds of reminders delivered to your feed reader too. If you have a conference and your Call for Papers is open or upcoming, add it to the list!

The PHPBenelux 2011 conference's Call for Proposals has been open since earlier this year but the deadline for submission is on the horizon.

After a successful first conference earlier this year, the PHPBenelux team is proud to announce the 2nd edition of the PHPBenelux Conference. We're extending to two days this year with a half day tutorial, and 1.5 days of conference. The conference is on Friday 28th January and Saturday 29th January in Antwerp. Become part of this year's speaker schedule at the PHPBenelux Conference 2011. Each chosen speaker receives a speaker package!

Talks should be about 60 minutes including Q&A and can be on a wide range of topics (some of their suggestions include content management systems, frameworks, best practices, etc). But remember, you need to submit your proposal before the end of the month to be considered!

Andi Gutmans has posted a reminder about the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo happening Spetember 15th through 18th in Santa Clara, CA.

I can't believe it's already ZendCon time again! I've been meeting with the planning committee and I'm really excited about this year's conference. All the usual things are back to make it great: we have a great lineup of speakers, the Meet the Teams session, and special guests like noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of ajaxian.com, and Alex Russell from Dojo.

He mentions things like the unconference (with even more great speakers, just in a more "unofficial" setting) and about the conference wiki with more details on who will be there and what they'll be attending.

There's still seats open for this year's conference, so reserve your spot today - check out the registration page on the ZendCon site for more information.

Those PHP developers that live around the Columbia, MD area might want to drop in to the PHP user group meeting that Theo Schlossnagle mentions on his blog today:

Just a friendly reminder that we'll be having our first meetup [on 05.14.2008] as planned. I thought as a good kick-off we could all collaboratively share what we do with PostgreSQL. We'll start off with a whirlwind tour of how OmniTI uses PotsgreSQL, taking a brief look at ZFS, DTrace and large datasets.

The event will be happening here and will start at about 6:30pm.