Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

Lorna Mitchell has posted an update to the PHP Women website with a wrapup from the recent Dutch PHP Conference that happened in Amsterdam on June 14th as written up by one of their Dutch members Ghica van Emde Boas

Meet Ghica van Emde Boas. Ghica is one of our Dutch members, herself a published author. She attended the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam last weekend, and was generous enough to donate three signed copies of her own book which went to assist some of the local ladies in their learning. Here is Ghica's account of her day.

Ghica's day included Zeev Suraski's talk, Marco Tabini's presentation on mayo (oh, and application design) and well as talks from Derick Rethans, Lorna Mitchell and Stefan Priebsch (oh, and the infamous Terry Chay).

Christopher Jones has a quick post with some information about a user group meeting happening in Brazil where the upcoming topic will cover the powerful combination of PHP and Oracle.

Elton Luís Minetto wrote to tell me that "PHPSC - a PHP user group of Santa Catarina in Brazil - is organizing an event dedicated to PHP that will take place at Chapeco on June 20." [...] He's presenting a session on PHP and Oracle, and will show some great results of using PHP's OCI8 with Oracle 11g connection pooling (DRCP).

The schedule for the event can be found here with details on which talks will be given when (including Elton's at 8am on the 21st.

Tony Bibbs has posted about the upcoming DC PHP Conference (happening June 2nd through the 4th in Washington, DC) and his talk "Fed Up of Framework Hype?"

For those of you that occasionally browse these pages you may recall a prior post on the subject. Given there was a bit of interest in that post I turned it into a talk for this conference.

He includes the abstract for his talk that covers the Framework of the Day that seems to be happening in PHP and what really lies behind each new release. He will talk on how to evaluate a framework for your use and how to not get wowed by the Next Big Thing that comes along and claims to do it all better and simpler than any before.

You can find out more about the DC PHP Conference from their website and registration is still open for those that want to reserve their spot.

The PHP London Conference group has posted three more mp3s of presentations given at this year's conference - one from Scott MacVicar, another from Zoe Slattery and the last from Anthony Phillips:

• Scott MacVicar talking about Sqlite3, explaining what it is and how it's best applied with PHP. [mp3] [pdf]
• Zoe Slattery talking about testing PHP itself and how you can write tests to help improve PHP in the future. [mp3] [pdf]
• Anthony Phillips talking about IBM's Project Zero, how it can give your existing code a new lease of life in a REST context amongst other subjects. [mp3] [pdf]

Check out the conference's site for other great speakers and their sessions (with mp3s and pdfs).

From the GNUCitizen blog, there's a new post about a recent meeting (of the OWASP London Chapter) where several presentations were given on methods for exploiting PHP applications. The three talks given were:

• Rodrigo Marcos - hacking PHP sockets for fun and profit
• David Kierznowski - exploitation techniques using real world examples
• Colin Watson - talk about security badges

There's links to the slides for one the formal presentations, the exploitation techniques - two sets: the remote exploit examples and local exploit examples.

On the PHP Coding Practices blog, Tim Koschuetzki has posted his wrapup of the very first (of many, I'm sure) CakeFest conferences that wrapped up at the beginning of this month (Feb 2008):

I would like to tell you about the first CakeFest we had from February 6th till February 8th in Orlando / Florida. I attended the conference which was dedicated to CakePHP [...] There were a few nice talks as well.

He mentions talks by Garrett Woodworth, his own talk about what's new in CakePHP 1.2, Nate Abele's look at REST interfaces and a talk from Felix Geisendorfer dealing with the CakePHP/jQuery combination.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the seventh episode of their ZendCon sessions (as recorded at 2007's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo).

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Eli White present "High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques".

The usual three methods are all there for enjoying this new episode: grab the mp3 directly, listen using the player on the page or you can get this and other great episodes by subscribing to their podcast feed.