In the wake of this year's TEKX conference (held in Chicago lat week) several of the PHP community members that were able to attend have posted summaries of their time there. Here's the list so far:

• Lorna Mitchell
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Ligaya Turmelle
• Chris Hartjes
• Bradley Holt
• Garrison Locke
• Rich Bowen
• Jason Austin
• Keith Casey
• Rob Allen
• Chance Garcia

There's also the official wrapup from Cal Evans on the php|architect site.

If you were able to attend TEKX this year and have a post you don't see on this list, let me know and I'll get it added!

Chance Garcia has posted more of his great "live blogging" posts from the various sessions he's been attending at the TEKX conference happening in Chicago. The new posts covered the sessions on:

• continuous integration in PHP applications (Sebastian Bergmann)
• code release and management (Eli White)
• Date and Time functionality (Derick Rethans)
• Zend_Form (Rob Allen)
• memcache and apc (Ben Ramsey)
• Scalability & MySQL (Ligaya Turmelle)
• Streams, Sockets & Filters (Elizabeth Smith)
• New SPL Features in PHP 5.3
• XDebug (Derick Rethans)
• Corss-Platform PHP (Elizabeth Smith)
• Marco Tabini's closing remarks

I'm sure more posts can be expected from today's sessions, so keep an eye on his blog if you weren't able to attend this year's conference.

The TEKX conference is now in full swing and one attendee, Chance Garcia has already shared some of what he's learned at the tutorial days - being the bad guy and best practices.

Chance Garcia was in the "Bad Guy For a Day" session given by Arne Blankerts

This will be interesting since this will be stream of thought on the tutorial as it goes on. [...] Remember to secure your infrastructure. Anecdote about a setup with default root of database was given. Keep in mind how you train users. Example error alerts training people to accept errors as ok and to click through.

He "live blogs" the rest of the session that mentions infrastructure issues, user interface problems and some of the more popular attack vectors.

His other "live blog" covered Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Lorna Mitchell's Best Practices talk, complete with mentions of version control practices, design patterns, unit testing and more.

In case you weren't able to make it to the latest webcast from the php|architect TEK-X series - Kristina Chodorow on MongoDB - you can catch it all here in the recording of the event.

MongoDB is part of a new wave of persistent storage engines that make up the NoSQL movement. The most popular websites in the world are switching to or already use non-relational databases. Why? Scalability. This session will cover why, when, and how to use MongoDB: a fast, stable, easy-to-learn document database.

You can find out more about MongoDB from its website and more about the remaining TEK-X webcast series (only two left!) on the TEK-X webcast series page.

As a part of this year's TEK-X webcast series, Cal Evans will be presenting today on a subject near and dear to his heart - working with (and correctly handling) remote developers for your projects. From the php|architect blog:

Come join us for this week's TEK·X webcast as Cal Evans discusses the details of managing remote developers. Cal won't be speaking on why you should allow your developers to telecommute - he has done that already. For those who see the light, however, he will give practical advice on the tools and techniques to use when managing distributed teams.

The webcast will be happening today at 1pm (EDT) and there's still spots open, so if you want to get in on this great session, head over to the gotomeeting page and signup!

Brandon Savage has posted a reminder for those interested in caching in their WordPress installations - he'll be giving a webcast (as a part of the TEK-X series) on just that.

On Friday, I'll be presenting a webcast called "Caching for Wordpress." In this webcast, we'll talk about ways to make Wordpress perform better, including aspects of caching from the application perspective and from the content perspective. There will be a discussion of caching plugins available, as well as a discussion of the Wordpress API and what it offers by way of caching opportunities.

The webcast itself is free but you'll need to register for a spot if you'd like to attend. While you're there, you might also sign up for a few of the other webinars in the series like al Evans' talk on remote developers or Scott Macvicar talking about Facebook's HipHop tool.

Ruslan Yakushev has posted some of the slides and the questions from their "PHP Performance on Windows" webcast the other day (a part of the TEKX webcast series). He co-presented with Mark Brown.

There were a number of question at the end of the webcast that we did not get to answer due to lack of time. This blog post provides answers to those questions.

Questions were asked about php_mssql.dll removal, .htaccess on IIS, adding wincache support for Zend_Cache, a Microsoft-developed toolkit for PHP and quite a few more. If you missed the presentation, you can see the slides here and keep checking back on the TEKX webcast page for the video/audio download.

php|architect has announced another podcast series leading up to this year's TEK-X conference happening in May.

Last year php|architect and Microsoft got together and hosted a series of webcasts on topics of interest to PHP developers. We had so much fun that we are going to do it again this year. As most of you know, we had so many great proposals submitted to TEK·X that there was no way we could schedule them all. This year, instead of saying "Sorry, better luck next year" to these presenters, we selected the best of the ones that we couldn't find room for and invited them to be a part of the webcast series.

You can see the full list of the webcasts on this page. This round includes topics like Doctrine, Drupal, caching on WordPress and Windows Azure. You'll need to register to attend, but there's no charge for the registration. The first one starts next week - Friday, March 5th with Jonathan Wage covering Doctrine 2.

Two conferences, TekX and ConFoo both released their schedules yesterday to an eagerly awaiting public.

The TekX schedule includes fourty-two talks with two keynotes and includes topics ranging from the Zend Framework, PHP best practices, version control systems (git and svn), RIA topics and code security and testing.

The ConFoo schedule includes similar topics but a wider range of sessions with other subjects like Java, Project Management, System administration, SEO, Ruby and Python.

There's still plenty of time to sign up for both, so if you'd like to register for TekX, visit their signup page and if you'd like to get in on ConFoo, you can register here.

Continuing the in the spirit of trying something different (first with the Charter Tickets) the php|architect crew are trying something else for next year's TekX conference - dropping the unconference all together in favor of a Hack Track.

So after much deliberation and debate, we reached a simple conclusion: We're dropping the Unconference this year. (gasp) I know you're disappointed but in exchange we were able to add 6 more sessions to the 36 we had. Now we only had ~9 submissions for every speaking slot! Whew, problem solved. [...] So after a bit of eggnog, arguing with Marco & Cal, bribing Arbi with cookies, and another round of eggnog, we came up with another idea: Enter...the Hack Track.

The idea behind the Hack Track is that the conference provides the space/projectors/coffee/etc and the attendees are free to use the area to meet, share ideas and talk about their next great ideas.