Hasin Hayder has posted a tutorial to his site showing you how to create a bot for Slack that will monitor your sales on Envato connected via their API.

Slack is awesome. Slack is the de-facto of modern team communication and I am pretty sure that this is not the first time you’re hearing something like this about slack. But if you’re really never used slack, oh boy, I feel pity for you. Anyway, in this article we’re going to make a slack bot that will monitor the sales in our envato account and notify from time to time as soon as someone purchased an item. Pretty useful, eh?

He shows how to make a new channel in your Slack instance (he uses "#sales") and how to add in a named webhook to connect the bot to. He then generates a token on the Envato service to access their API, giving it the needed permissions. He includes the simple curl-based script to make the request to the Envato API to get the latest results and then turn around and post it back to the Slack channel.

If you were wanting to make it to this year's True North PHP conference (next week!) but can't be there in person, they're providing another option - two new kinds of tickets: a video-on-demand option and a live streaming one.

The live stream version gives you access to a live stream of all three tracks as they happen as well as access to the videos after the fact. If you're not able to watch real-time, the video-on-demand option will provide the same access to the videos post-conference to watch at your convenience.

You can pick up these and the regular in-person kinds of tickets from their ticket sales page but hurry - the conference is just a few days away!

The Lone Star PHP Conference (being held June 28th and 29th in Dallas, Texas) has officially announced their full schedule and the opening on the sale of their Early Bird tickets.

Sessions to be presented at this year's two-day event include:

• Profiling PHP Applications (Derick Rethans)
• Composer for busy developers (Rafael Dohms)
• Building web apps from a new angle (Pablo Godel)
• Essential GIT for Developers (Adam Culp)
• Usability For Developers (Beth Tucker Long)
• Turbo Charge Your Logs (Jeremy Cook)

This year's event also includes a "PHP Foundations" track aimed at those just starting out with the language or wanting to learn PHP for the first time. You can pick up yourEarly Bird tickets right now - there's a limited number so be sure to get yours soon!

The PHP Argentina conference officially announced the sale of the tickets for this year's event (happening October 4th & 5th in Buenos Aires):

As of today we are opening the sale of PHP Conference Argentina tickets. And what better way than to offer a big incentive for those who get them early. [...] Hurry and get your ticket now! There is limited space, so you may be risking being left out. Remember that PHP Conference Argentina is the most important conference for developers in Latin America.

Tickets are discounted 50% off their regular price if you get them before the end of May and the first 50 tickets purchased will be entered into a raffle for a seat at the Speakers dinner. Speakers for this year's event include Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Andrei Zmievski, Mark Story, Nate Abele and Pablo Godel. They haven't announced the schedule yet, but it's coming soon.

For more information about the event or to get your tickets, check out the main conference site.

As Bradley Holt mentions in this new post to his blog, the tickets for the Northeast PHP Conference will be going on sale this Thursday (June 28th) for $99 USD.

The conference will be taking place on Saturday, August 11th and Sunday, August 12th at Microsoft's NERD Center in Cambridge, MA and will feature talks from some generous sponsors.

Sessions at this year's event include:

• How NASA uses PHP
• Creating an Epic RESTful API and Conquering the World
• PHP Security 101
• Where MVC Ends, Services Begin
• Getting into Git

This promises to be an excellent conference, so be sure to get your tickets as soon as they're available! You can find out more about the event on the main conference site.

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.

The Dutch PHP Conference has officially announced that they've opened the ticket sales for this year's event (happening in May).

At the moment, we're selling tickets with an early bird discount - that's € 325 for a 2-day conference ticket, € 325 for the tutorial day or € 595 for both. Don't wait too long to get your ticket because early bird sales will end on April 1st. After the early bird, ticket prices will be € 375 for a 2-day conference ticket, € 375 for the tutorial day or € 695 for the full conference pass.

If you'd like to order your tickets for the event, head over to their registration page and pick up as many tickets as you need. Be sure and get them before that April 1st deadline (no fools here) to get these discounted rates.

According to this post over on the C7Y site (php|architect's community site), their php|tek 2008 conference has already reached the forty percent sold mark on seats for the event.

Seat sales for our php|tek 2008 conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and 23rd, are starting to pick up, and over 40% of all available spots have already been reserved.

You can signup on their conference website as well as get all of the details on the four day event including the speaker schedule, hotel and travel information - even a Boss Help section to help with convincing your local PHB.

The Builder.au website has a new article about Zend's new struggles to find their business model in an open source world.

Open-source software company Zend Technologies, hoping to double its revenue this year, says it will narrow its focus to big business and Web 2.0-style start-ups, according to incoming CEO Harold Goldberg.

The article talks about the obvious routes (selling products to large facilities, governments, etc) but also in partnerships (IBM) and other yet to be discovered paths.