With the deadline for the Call for Papers for the TEK X conference quickly approaching (November 23rd!) Cal Evans has posted some last-minute tips to help improve your submission for a better chance at acceptance.

As the Call for Papers progresses for TEKX, it dawns on me that I have the distinct privilege of having participated in the Call and Acceptance process of all three of the major PHP conferences, ZendCon, the Dutch PHP Conference, and now TEK. Thinking back, this gives me a unique perspective on the process. Since I get a lot of questions about "how do I get my talk accepted," I thought I would share some of what I have learned. Here are a few basic rules I have discerned.

Cal gives some suggestions on becoming known for knowing the topic well (blog it out), tailoring the abstract to the conference's focus, thinking about the experts that already exist, being interesting and being respectful of the Call for Papers rules.

If you'd like to get your submission in, head over to the submission form on the TEK X website!

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a relaunch of the ZendCon Sessions podcast today with this fifteenth episode, a talk given by Matthew Weier O'Phinney at the 2008 Zend/PHP Conference & Expo - "Getting Started with Zend Framework".

In this series we will be releasing regular sessions from ZendCon 2008 as we lead up to this year's ZendCon. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA ... and is Matthew Weier O'Phinney giving his presentation: "Getting Started with Zend Framework"

You can both check out the slides or listen to the talk either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can also subscribe to the feed to get future episodes automatically.

php|tek aims to be the conference of reference for PHP enthusiasts and professionals. As such, it features technical talks on topics that range from programming paradigms to internals development, all aimed at an audience comprised of beginners and professionals alike.

This year's theme is "$build->deploy->scale();"'"a nod to PHP's growing role in the rapid development of Internet applications of all sizes, from small to massive, covering a wide array of PHP-related topics. Regardless of the subject, we are partial to talks that tackle a specific issue in a thorough way, with a very pragmatic slant. Remember, attendees will come to the conference with the intent of learning something that they can take home and use in their daily lives'"they are not necessarily interested in why things work, but they are definitely interested in how they work.

Speakers get free access to the conference, some travel assistance (not completely paid for), and compensation for each of the talks given. Instead of havaing specific tracks of talks, they're opting for a "tag-based" approach, applying as many tags that fit to the talk.

To submit your talk ideas, send them off to proposals@phparch.com and include the usual contact info as well as a title, synopsis, audience level, talk type, and topics included in the presentation.

Remember, the deadline is December 21, 2005 - so get those proposals in today!

Paul Reinheimer has a new post to his blog today talking about a special event happening at this year's php|works conference - Pecha Kucha.

The format is a little bit different than a talk (thank god) and hopefully a lot more fun. Basically the presenter gets up there with twenty slides, each are going to be shown for exactly 20 seconds, for a total of six minutes forty seconds. No take backs, no do-overs, no boring slides full of code.

He tosses in a few FAQs for those interested (who can do it, what can it cover, etc) and who to contact to get yourself signed up - drop Elizabeth Naramore an email and let her know you're interested.

Thinking about trying your hand at submitting a talk to an upcoming PHP conference but aren't exactly sure where to get started? You might want to check out Lorna Mitchell's suggestions on some of the steps.

Speaking at conferences is a great way to share ideas and meet people - but actually getting the opportunity to do is a little more tricky and usually involves proposing a talk. [...] If you want to go to a conference, and there is a topic you'd like to share some thoughts on, then write them down and submit!

She talks about making the most of the submission form - submitting your abstract and including details why you and your talk should be selected for their conference. The comments include a few other suggestions like "don't submit the same one talk over and over", "try for something different" and remember that you always have something to contribute.

Chris Jones has posted a wrapup of day one at this year's OpenWorld happening in San Francisco. This first day included the hands-on PHP sessions open to anyone that wanted to come experience the combination of this powerful language and database firsthand.

The PHP Hands-On-Labs went smoothly today. What a pleasant feeling! There was great interest - all but two seats had been pre-booked for the first lab - and lots of studious work done.

He gives thanks to the people that helped out and mentions some issues they had with some of the PHP demonstrations there at the booth. He mentions Levi Dixon and Nicholas Tang's talk called Building and Deploying Web-Scale Social Networking Applications, Using PHP and Oracle Database coming Tuesday and a paper that might be useful to PHP developers using Oracle - Best Practices for Developing Performant Applications for Oracle Database 11g.

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 LuĂ­s 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.