The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce its first international PHP Conference. It will be held Saturday, September 27th in Barcelona (at Citilab, Cornella).

The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and the surrounding area, and also evangelizing the PHP technology to universities and enterprises as well.

The group has held other events this year but this one is the first which will be completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others.

For more information about the Barcelona PHP Conference 2008, including more information on the location, speakers and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es.

The Symfony blog has officially announced this year's symfony camp happening September 12th and 13th:

This year again, DOP organizes the symfony camp. The event takes place on the 12th and 13th of September. This is a unique opportunity to meet the community. The camp will start with a training on symfony 1.1, given by Nicolas Perriault (symfony 1.1 release manager). The second day is packed with great talks.

Speakers already lined up for the event include Dustin Whittle, Fabian Lange, Lambert Beekhuis and Ian Christian. Check out the official site for more information on where it's happening and to reserve your spot today.

A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

Amit Singh passed on a note about an event happening in September, a gathering of PHPers around Pune, India - PHPCamp.

PHPCamp is a 'ad-hoc gathering' for PHP community. It similar to barcamp, but more focused towards PHP based web application development. This means that anyone can come to PHPCamp and participate.

Right now the details are pretty tentative, but the even is scheduled to happen on September 20th and will last all day. They're still looking for a venue but you can go ahead and add your name to their list of campers if you'd like to attend.

The Zend Developer Zone has an announcement about an upcoming PHP user group meeting happening in Boston:

What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise. Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where Enterprise PHP (and OSS) is going and how it's going to get there. This promises to be a great evening with plenty of "horsepower" to answer your questions.

Speakers for the evening will be Mark de Visser, Zend's CMO and David Boloker, IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies. The meeting will be happening on Tuesday, September 11th starting at around 6:30pm. The meeting will be held in Cambridge at 1 Rodger's Street. Check out the official announcement of the meeting for full details.

The latest issue of php|architect magaizne has been released today - September 2006.

Highlights in this issue include:

• "Is PHP 5 really slower than PHP 4?" by Andi Gutmans and Dmitry Stogov
• "State of the PEAR" contributed by Aaron Wormus, a walkthrough of the history of PEAR
• "Know Your Stuff" from Philip Olson, looking at the PHP Manual
• "Desperately Seeking Susan" by Tom Gidden, a look at the basics of creating a search engine
• and, of course the Security Corner (Ilia Alshanetsky) is back with part two of the look at configuration in PHP

You can either pick up this issue by itself (about $4.20 USD) or as a part of a shiny, new subscription (about $35.00 USD).

Stephan Schmidt has posted some great news to the PHP-Tools blog today - the O'Reilly book he's been working on "PHP Design Patterns" has been completed and sent off to press.

The work of the last six months is finally bearing fruit and I will be able to spend my spare time on coding again instead of just writing. If you wondered, why patTemplate or any of my other open source projects did not show any progress, this announcement should answer your questions.

I put nearly all of my thoughts on software architecture, OO design and patterns into this book and thus it consists of 370 pages dealing with OO development in PHP 5.1, creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioural patterns as well as enterprise patterns and MVC architectures. Furthermore it covers SPL, Propel and patTemplate to provide some real-life examples of the patterns.

A note to all readers out there, though - the book is in German (despite the English title). If you want to check out a sample bit of code from the book or just want to get more information on it, check out it's website.

This year's php|works / db|works conference is coming up in September, and the speakers have been chosen to give their talks. Several of them have also posted to this fact in their blogs:

• Wez Furlong will be giving his "usual talk" on PDO as well as a brand new one covering "PHP and Mail: Best Practices"
• Sara Goleman giving a three hour workshop on Extension writing and an hour in another talk covering PDO_User
• Sebastian Bergmann presenting two talks - "Testing PHP Applications" and "The State of AOP in PHP"
• Paul Jones on "Organizing Your PHP Project"

The rest of the schedule has also been posted, and includes other PHP notables such as Rasmus Lerdorf, Chris Shiflett, Paul Reinheimer, and Ilia Alshanetsky.

A new PHP event has been put together for those a bit more outdoor-inclined - PHP Appalachia.

Anyone with any knowledge (or an urge to learn) about PHP is welcome to attend. Reegistration is only $15 USD for attendance price, including an event t-shirt. Accomodations are available for a reasonable rate (besides brining your own shelter) and meals are available for about $25 USD per day.

You can get the complete details from the event's website, and if you'd like to help promote the camping trip, digg it!