On the Symfony blog there's a new post for those that have been putting off getting their tickets to SymfonyLive London and, more specifically, the pre-conference workshops. Time is limited and the training sessions are almost sold out!

All Symfony conferences come with pre-conference workshops. We organized them to enable the conference attendees to get trained on Symfony and its ecosystem just before the conference, during special workshops sessions at a very special price. The idea is to get the most out of the conference and enhance your Symfony skills before learning new tips and tricks from the speakers’ experience during the conference. We organize 4 different pre-conference workshops at SymfonyLive London 2018 on September 27th and they are almost all sold out!

They also share a listing of the pre-conference workshops happening at this year's event:

• "Symfony 4 Best Practices" by Nicolas Grekas from Symfony
• "Building API-driven apps with API Platform" by Kévin Dunglas from Les-Tilleuls.coop
• "Symfony Messenger" by Samuel Rozé, creator of the component
• "Lightning Fast Tests" by Jakub Zalas, Symfony core team member

Each workshop title in the post is a link to more information about the workshop and how to pick up your tickets. For more information about the conference, ticket pricing and to order yours, check out the main conference site.

The StarTutorial.com site has continued their introductory look at design patterns and using them in PHP with a new article covering the Singleton pattern.

[The Singleton pattern] ensures a class has only one instance, and provides a global point of access of it.

They use a more real-world example to illustrate the use of a singleton: organizing patients at a doctor's office using a ticketing system. In their example, the system makes use of a "TickerPrinter" object to represent the ticketing system. The issue is that the printer has to check every time to see if it needs more paper or if the ink is out in the first example. They refactor this to use a singleton, creating a getInstance method to return the same instance of a "TicketPrinter" object each time it's called rather than having to create a new one and manage it individually.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a reminder about the Early Bird registration deadline for the 2018 edition of the Laracon Online conference.

As the year comes to a close, remember that for the next 23 days, you can still buy tickets to Laracon Online 2018 for $12 (regularly $25). Tickets will go up to $25 on January 3rd, which is still a great deal for the all-star speaker lineup planned. Grab tickets today before the busy rush of the holiday and new year.

Tickets are only $12 USD at the Early Bird pricing and the conference will be happening February 7th, 2018 beginning at 10am. Speakers include several of the Laravel regulars like Adam Wathan, Chris Fado, Matt Stauffer and, of course, Taylor Otwell. You can find out more information about the conference and pick up tickets of your own at the Early Bird price (while it lasts) on the Laracon Online website.

The Laravel News site has posted a new announcement today with a reminder that today (Feb 22nd) is the last day to get Laracon Online Early Bird tickets for just $10 USD. After this they'll go up to their normal price.

Today is the last chance for you to join over 3,000 developers and get an early bird ticket to Laracon Online for just $10. Each ticket purchase includes access to the live event video, conference swag, and a special Slack channel for hanging out and mingling during the event. With your ticket, you can sit on your couch and watch it all live!

Laracon Online will be held on March 8th, 2017 with opening remarks at 8:45 AM EST. If you can’t attend that day, all the talks will be recorded and available online for viewing at your convenience shortly after the conference ends.

The post also lists out some of the "conference swag" that will be provided to attendees including a discount on Linode services, a Blackfire.io discount and others that require a bit of action on your part but offer large discounts as a result. You can find out more about the event on the main conference website.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an update about their upcoming Symfony Live London event happening in just three weeks.

We’re almost there! Only 3 weeks until the SymfonyLive London conference! We’re getting more and more ready as the days go, what about you? It’s high time you got your ticket!

What’s in store for you?

The post goes on to talk about the different features of the conference including:

• Pre-conference workshops on September 15th
• A full day double-track conference
• The sponsor village
• The Social event with all the attendees

They also mention a raffle they're holding to give away Symfony elePHPants to a select few individuals. You must purchase your ticket during a certain time to be entered into the raffle but you could win an elePHPant or a full reimbursement of your ticket to the conference. Check out the full post for more details.

On the Laravel News site there's an announcement about a live stream available for Laracon US happening at the end of July (2016) - the 27th through the 29th.

For the first time ever, Laracon US is offering a live stream plus early access videos.

When you purchase access on the day of the conference you will get an email link to access the stream and be able to watch all the talks except for the one by Ryan Singer.

You can pick up your ticket for just $25 USD and get access to both the stream and early access videos. You can find out more about the conference itself and the talks that are scheduled on the main conference website.

If you were wanting to make it to this year's True North PHP conference (next week!) but can't be there in person, they're providing another option - two new kinds of tickets: a video-on-demand option and a live streaming one.

The live stream version gives you access to a live stream of all three tracks as they happen as well as access to the videos after the fact. If you're not able to watch real-time, the video-on-demand option will provide the same access to the videos post-conference to watch at your convenience.

You can pick up these and the regular in-person kinds of tickets from their ticket sales page but hurry - the conference is just a few days away!

The PfCongres conference has officially posted their schedule for this year's event (happening September 14th in Utrecht) and have opened up sales of the Tutorial Day tickets.

Sessions at this year's event include:

• Inside the Symfony 2 DIC and Config
• A hands-on introduction to writing unittests using PHPUnit
• Debugging HTTP
• Sassy Stylesheets with SCSS
• Frontend Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
• ProTalking' your way into Open Source

You can pick up both Early Bird and Tutorial tickets for this year's event right now, so if you're interested in going hurry and get these prices while you can!

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to create digital tickets using PHP and the Apple Passbook service.

Why should we PHP warriors care at all about Apple’s Passbook? Well first because Apple made this technology open (well, sort of…), second because it can be used outside iOS devices, and third because it involves a lot of well-known and loved technologies like JSON and RESTful APIs. I’d also add that it’s a very interesting piece of technology, but that’s my personal opinion. In this article I’ll show you how I built a sample web application that creates and distributes passes in the form of a “PHPMaster Membership Card”. It is not a full-featured product, but it’s a nice base to build on for more serious real world uses.

He talks about the concept of a "pass" (a digitally signed document that can be easily distributed) and the types that the Apple service lets you make. His example (sample code here) is Silm based and Idorim & Paris for the data handling. He talks some about the certificate handling that's involved and the structure of the application including the certs, application code, templates and images. He then works through the code step-by-step and explains what each part does and how it connects with Apple's service to generate the pass.

The 7PHP.com site, in collaboration with the Nomand PHP user group is giving away two free tickets to attend this month's user group event (happening May 22nd).

NomadPHP is like a virtual PHP User Group mainly for people who do not have the chance to avail of a local PHP user group. But it is open to ANYONE around the world. NomadPHP is an initiative brought forward by the icon of The PHP Community, namely ‘His Awesomeness’ Mr Cal Evans. It will kick-start its first group talk session on the Wednesday 22nd May 2013 (i.e in some 16 days as from the date of this post). The speaker is the PRO PHP Guy / PRO Zend Framework Evangelist and author of the book Zend Framework in action, Rob Allen. Rob will be introducing and talking about Zend Framework 2 – it is a must for anyone willing to learn ZF 2.

The Nomad PHP user group is designed to be a "user group for those that don't have one". It's a virtual group meeting once a month that you can attend anywhere in the world. You do have to purchase tickets, however. This post shows you how you can enter to win one of the two free tickets, though - either via email or by writing a PHP article for 7PHP.com.