The Twilio blog has a new post from PHP developer advocate Margaret Staples showing you how to integrate Twilio and Laravel to create a group video chat system. This makes use of the Twilio Video API to build the connections between users via a Laravel application.

While words alone are powerful, the inflections of people’s voices, the gestures and expressions we unconsciously flow through during conversation all contain a wealth of information often lost to us in our technology driven communications.

Using Twilio’s Video API you can now add the richness of face to face interactions to any web project.

Here we’ll look at how to create a Laravel web application that gives users the ability to join existing video groups or create their own. You can preview what we’re building here.

The tutorial starts with a few assumptions (things you'll need to have already set up) and a link to a GitHub repository that provides some of the boilerplate code. After a few setup commands the application should be ready to add the Twilio API/account configuration values and the addition of three routes for room joins, creates and listing. Next she creates the controller to handle the incoming requests and the views for the page output including the video and audio service provided by a Twilio script. Finally they show how to demo the result and include a few troubleshooting steps you can follow if something seems to be going wrong.

Kore Nordmann has a new post talking about the PHP project room that'll be happening at this year's FrOSCon 2013.

` For the eigth time we will be at the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, near Bonn. This time we will organize the PHP project room again. We also offer space to discuss related topics, or just hack with other open minded people around you. We would love to welcome you at the PHP project room. FrOSCon is a conference organized by geeks for geeks. One of the awesome things about FrOSCon is, that you will not only meet software developers, but also hardware geeks, telephony geeks, knitting geeks, gaming geeks. Prepare for that.

You can submit your talk ideas for this year's event (which ends on June 13th).

Kore Nordmann has a new post to his blog mentioning that the Call for Papers for this year's Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) has been started up.

This year we will organize a PHP room for the third time, like in 2006 and 2007. We hope that we can keep up with the amazing conferences from the last years, and we expect it to be a wonderful open source event again. We would love to welcome you in the PHP room, either giving a talk, or just for a chat or listening. We are looking for speakers right now by starting the Call for Papers (CfP), which will end at the 23.05.2009 - please submit your talks.

Other non-PHP topics you could also submit on include development practices, security, desktop development, open hardware and several Java-related suggestions. You can find out more about these and what needs to be done to submit your proposal on this page of the conference site.

Unfortunately, as Elizabeth Naramore has posted, all of the rooms for this year's PHP Appalachia conference are sold out. There are other ways you can still involved though...

• Signup on the waiting list for a room that might happen to surprise everyone and come open (for just the $15 registration fee)
• Pay the registration fee and find a spot at the KOA campground nearby
• Or you can pay the $15 and find your own spot at other nearby locations.

The actually conference is limited to 50 people and as of today they still have some spots left - but they're going quick! If you're thinking about going, be sure to register now!