In a recent post to the SaniSoft blog Aditya Mooley shares some experiences from this year's PHP Camp in Pune, India (back on January 9th, 2010).

Scheduled in October 2009 initially, it was postponed due Swine Flu. Nearly 2000 including PHP professionals, newbie and students registered for the event. The numbers were really overwhelming for the (un)conference entering only its second year. This year I got a chance to attend the event and deliver talks on what SANIsoft is best known for '" CakePHP and writing secure PHP apps.

Aditya talks about the venue - good except for a few issues with the size of some rooms - and a well coordinated setup for signing up for the unconference slots. He gave his talk on CakePHP but there was a wide range of other technologies represented including Silverlight, Microsoft's developer tools and Flex.

Manoj Sachwani has put together a summary listing of some of the popular PHP frameworks available today along with a brief summary of each.

Recently, I took on a project to code a web application from scratch. [...] Now, Most of you would suggest I should use a pre-existing open source solution, and logic would dictate I should probably use one. Sure! I should...But, How then am I going to learn and become more geeky and at the same time save time develop and deliver the web app? Enter, PHP Frameworks.

Some of the frameworks that made his list include Akelos, CodeIgniter, Prado, the Zend Framework and Symfony.

The conference has only just ended and already those summaries are rolling in - here's just a few of the many out there:

• Jason Austin's look back - day 1, day 2, day 3
• Ed Finkler's summary
• one from Fabien Potencier
• Michelangelo van Dam
• a review from Anna Filina Keith Casey's look at the Unconfernece
• A summary from Travis Swicegood
• David Coallier's post to the echolibre blog
• a quick wrapup from the Zend Developer Zone

If you weren't able to attend or just want to catch back up on the presentations you missed, you can always check them out on Joind.in!

This year's PHP North West conference has come to a close and summaries are popping up all over the web from those who attended. Here's a list of just a few:

• Lorna Mitchell's summary
• A writeup from Jordan Hatch
• Stefan Koopmanschap's look back
• Rob Allen's summary

If you attended, be sure to rate the conference and sessions given so the speakers and organizers know how they did!

Now that the CodeWorks conference is on some of its final stops, speakers and attendees are posting about their experiences. Here's the list so far:

• A running journal from Cal Evans, a speaker on the tour
• A series from Ben Ramsey, speaker - days 1&2, days 3&4, days 5&6, 7&8, 9&10, 11&12
• Jason Sweat's summary of his time spent on the tour
• A summary from a Dallas regional speaker, Vance Lucas
• Chuck Burgess' summary of the Atlanta stop
• Ed Finkler's talks and a look back
• The CodeWorks recap from the Blue Parabola blog
• Gena's review of CodeWorks NYC

There'll be more to come as the conference finishes out its run so stay tuned here for more from the community as they're posted.

On the echolibre blog there's a recent post looking at the recent meeting of the (Recommended) Standards Group at this year's php|tek:

This post will briefly discuss the formation of a Recommended PHP Standards Group, as put forward by a meeting of PHP developers at the conference. As would be expected, a bit of controversy surrounds this proposal, but my hope would be that it would be accepted and grow within the global PHP community in the coming years.

He talks about those in attendance and a sneak preview of some of the standards they're talking about - like those dealing with namespacing and exception naming.

Recently Alex Luneburg attended the PHP UK 2009 conference in London. She's written up a great summary of the entire event for the PHP Women website.

For anyone thinking that PHP conferences are full of dry technically laborious talks attended by rows and rows of pasty sun-starved bespectacled boys, thus making them a completely unapproachable unappealing yawn-fest then I'd say think again!

She talks about some of her expectations (set a bit low) and how they were smashed - in a good way - in everything from the quality of the talks to the social interaction between her and other attendees. She mentions some of the talks specifically including one of her favorites, Chris Shiflett's Security-Centered Design.

So to anyone who's never thought of going to a conference before, or who hasn't yet plucked up the courage then I really encourage you to go! [...] If someone like me can go and have such a good time and get so much out of it then I really can't think of any excuse for anyone else not to go too!

The PHP UK conference happened this past weekend and already the summaries and blogs pointing to slides have started coming in. Here's the posts so far:

Summaries/Wrap-ups

• Stefan Koopmanschap
• Federico Cargnelutti
• Rob Allen
• Leonid Mamchenkov
• Marc Gear
• Lorna Mitchell

Slides Posts

• Stefan Koopmanschap - Myphp-busters: symfony framework

Keep checking back for more details from the community as they're posted.

On his PseudoCoder.com blog Matt has posted the fifth edition of the CakePHP Digest - summing up recently CakePHP-related news into one neat package.

This is my third digest and for the first time there isn't a clear lead story. I was going to go with gwoo's message that CakePHP 1.2 had received close to 25k downloads in the first 6 days of its release. That works out to 1.5 million downloads extrapolated over a full year. Actual download rate will likely taper off - I just wanted to use the word extrapolate.

Other topics mentioned include:

• Daniel Hofstetter's framework free agency
• Discussions about whether to accept bugs without test cases
• An article on building The Bakery
• Comparisons to Symfony and the Yii frameworks
• Lots of new content in The Bakery

For those that weren't able to attend this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, here's some posts and slides from the conference to give you a taste:

Slides

• David Sklar - Static and Dynamic Analysis at Ning
• Ben Ramsey - Distribution and Publication With Atom Web Services
• Mike Naberezny & Matthew Weier O'Phinney - PHP Developer Best Practices
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects, phpUnderControl: A Quick Start to Continuous Integration
• Brian DeShong - Rickroll To Go With WURFL, PHP, and Other Open Source Tools
• Stefan Esser - Lesser Known Security Problems in PHP Applications
• Jay Pipes - Legend of Drunken Query Master: The Apprentice's Journey
• John Coggeshall - Ria Development With Flex And PHP
• Ed Finkler - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR
• Matthew Turland - ZendCon 2008 Slides Up (Creating Web Services with Zend Framework & Web Scraping)
• Rob Richards - Digital Identity
• Elizabeth Smith - PECL Picks, PHP on the Desktop (PHP-GTK) & Runs on PHP5
• Ivo Jansch - Enterprise PHP Development

Blog Posts

• PHPWomen - Days 0 and 1, ZendCon08 Days 2 and 3
• Daniel Cousineau - ZendCon08 Day 1 - PECL Picks, ZendCon08 Day 1 - The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development, ZendCon08 Day 1 Wrap Up
• Ibuildings - Daily ZendCon posts and wrapup
• Christopher Jones - ZendCon2008 Wrapup
• Paul Reinheimer - ZendCon
• Stas Malyshev - ZendCon 08 php 5.3
• Rob Allen ZendCon 08
• Chris Shiflett - ZendCon
• Keith Casey - ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 1, ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 2, ZendUnCon - Update 3, ZendUnCon 2008 - Update 4, ZendCon 2008 - Day 0, ZendCon 2008 - Closing Notes
• Elizabeth Smith - ZendCon 2008 wrap up
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney - ZendCon08 Wrapup
• Ivo Jansch - ZendCon 2008: more community, less corporate
• Brian DeShong - Conference wrap-up: ZendCon 2008