On the Symfony blog they've shared a post giving you an "inside look" at their Call for Papers process for the SymfonyCon and SymfonyLife events. Each conference is different and has a different process for attracting speakers and selecting them once the Call for Papers has completed.

All the Symfony conferences we organize are aimed at gathering the Symfony community together to enable every community member to meet each other, share best practices and learn tips and about new features. This all happens in a convivial atmosphere that feels like a big family reunion. The highlight, of course, is listening to high quality talks. The speaker line up is very important to us and we take great care to make sure the talks we select will be appreciated and useful for the majority of conference attendees.

[...] The CFP criteria are available online and are the same for all the conferences: we're looking for the best Symfony-focused topics that are relevant to the community. We don't select speakers based on any racial, gender or physical criteria: all the talk proposals received are studied no matter who the speaker is.

They talk about what they provide to speakers, how they review the talks once the CFP is complete and some about the committee that does the selection. With the speakers they want selected they then send out the acceptance notifications and confirm schedules. The post finishes up talking about their emphasis on trying to improve the ration of female to male speakers and their code of contact.

As a result of the ZendCon advisory board for this year's event, Joe Devon has posted a guide that wants to help you get your talks accepted to conferences in the future (both PHP-related and not).

For those who don’t know what an advisory board is, conference organizers get loads of proposals and need help deciding who should speak. So they ask others in the industry to provide some feedback. It was quite a learning experience.

He talks some about the "speaker backlash" that comes from being rejected, a lack of professionalism in some submittors and some basic (common sense) recommendations like:

• fill out the form completely, even if you don't think it's all useful
• start locally and then move up. A major conference isn't the place to try out your speaking first-shot
• whet the board's appetite - make them want to hear more about the topic or come up with something new
• share your unique experience with the technology
• use sites like Joind.in, Meetup and SlideShare to your advantage

In this new post from the IBuildings blog today Ivo Jansch looks at content management systems and how you can start to find that right fit for your and your company/organization.

At the moment, Wikipedia's list of content management systems features 137 unique CMS products. 59 of these are written in PHP. And that's only the ones that Wikipedia finds 'notable', which means these are the ones that have significant usage or large enough communities to be mentioned. [...] The sheer size of the CMS market is interesting when you consider that one of the most frequent questions we get at Ibuildings is: "What CMS do you recommend we use?"

In an experiment in his recent talk (at the IMS conference) he asked the audience which car he should purchase from his list of four. Of course, their answers were wrong because of one fact - no one asked about his requirements.

This is a definite first step to anyone looking for a CMS to fit their needs (or really any kind of software). He also mentions other criteria to consider like cost of ownership, technology required, features and functional requirements.

Previously from DevShed, they started a series on collections and sorting in PHP. Today, they've posted part two of the series that builds on that and looks at sorting algorithm examples.

This article will examine the primary sorting algorithms with code examples, and some empirical data regarding how they perform in relation to one another, as well as the size of the data set in question.

We will also create a function to fill up our collection with random data in order to test the sort algorithms with a sufficiently large data set. The sort algorithms listed above are the ones that every computer science student learns in college and are the primary sort algorithms found in real-world applications.

The sorting styles they cover include: bubble sort, heap sort, merge sort, quick sort, and shell sort. For each, they provide the code, making it a simple matter of cut and paste to make it work in your script. There's not a whole lot of documentation going along with the code in this article, but the sorting code is simple enough to understand without it.

Previously from DevShed, they started a series on collections and sorting in PHP. Today, they've posted part two of the series that builds on that and looks at sorting algorithm examples.

This article will examine the primary sorting algorithms with code examples, and some empirical data regarding how they perform in relation to one another, as well as the size of the data set in question.

We will also create a function to fill up our collection with random data in order to test the sort algorithms with a sufficiently large data set. The sort algorithms listed above are the ones that every computer science student learns in college and are the primary sort algorithms found in real-world applications.

The sorting styles they cover include: bubble sort, heap sort, merge sort, quick sort, and shell sort. For each, they provide the code, making it a simple matter of cut and paste to make it work in your script. There's not a whole lot of documentation going along with the code in this article, but the sorting code is simple enough to understand without it.

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference for this year is getting closer and closer, and a few of the members of the PHP community have been selected to present their proposed talks for this year's edition.

The list so far includes:

• David Sklar on web application dependencies
• Adam Trachtenberg giving his talk on the "Dirty secrets of PHP 5's ext/soap extension"
• Chris Shiflett (along with Geoff Young) covering PHP testing, including mentions of Apache-Test, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and phpt

For more details or to sign up for the conference, visit their site and check out the long list of topics and tracks for this year's event.

The O'Reilly Open Source Conference for this year is getting closer and closer, and a few of the members of the PHP community have been selected to present their proposed talks for this year's edition.

The list so far includes:

• David Sklar on web application dependencies
• Adam Trachtenberg giving his talk on the "Dirty secrets of PHP 5's ext/soap extension"
• Chris Shiflett (along with Geoff Young) covering PHP testing, including mentions of Apache-Test, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and phpt

For more details or to sign up for the conference, visit their site and check out the long list of topics and tracks for this year's event.