There's an interesting set of posts from PHP community members Adam Culp and Cal Evans each on a similar subject centering around conferences and the presentations made at them. They both wonder if talks are getting too "soft" and not focusing as much on the technology and getting in-depth as they should be. From Cal:

PHP conferences are changing very slowly, and not in a way that I like. I blame myself. As a frequent speaker I am getting lazy. I get caught up in the excitement of the CfP, I write up 5-10 abstracts and shotgun them into the CfP system hoping that something hits the mark. I’ve not actually written these talks. In most cases, I’m pretty sure I can get 45 minutes on the topic, but I don’t know for sure because I’ve not bothered to write it yet. Adam Culp talks about this very thing in his post “Are Conference Talks Getting Too Soft?“.

Adam points out that, while introductory talks and overviews are acceptable level coverage for someone new to the speaking scene (or development), the trend seems to be that everyone is providing less "meat" in their talks.

It is hard to teach a great amount in a 1 hour talk, but if there is not some immediately usable content an attendee will have a tough time proving to their short sighted boss that it was worth their time.

Both Adam and Cal set out a challenge, both to themselves and other speakers in the community. They encourage you to spend more time with your subjects, get in-depth into the topics, present on what you're excited about and maybe even try them out locally first.

"That Podcast", hosted by PHP community members Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall has released their latest episode, Episode #7: The one where we didn't even bother with a topic.

That's right, Beau and Dave are back! After what turned out to be a whole month since their last episode, the spend some time catching up on a bunch of things that have gone on in that time. Most importantly, Dave explains why dogs need passports. Who knew? Plus some other techy things. They keep it a little shorter than usual (only an hour and a half, yo!) on account of Dave not feeling so well. Also, Dave quits That Podcast because nobody has ever used his awesome voicemail app. Oh wait, no, that is a lie. He didn't quit. The other part was true about nobody leaving a voicemail, though. It makes them both sad.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the episode, consider subscribing to their feed to get this and other great episodes as they're released.

In the latest episode of That Podcast, The One Where We Didn't Even Get to Our Scheduled Topic (episode #6), hosts Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall talk about a wide range of topics....except, apparently, the one they wanted to.

Some of the things (and people) mentioned in this latest show include:

• Jeremy Mikola
• ZendCon
• Chris Hartjes' Pluralsight course Play By Play (test-driven development)
• Pingdom
• The Dev Book Club
• Phil Sturgeon

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 to listen whenever.

In this new post to his blog Kenny Katzgrau has announced the formation of a new PHP-related group in the New York City area, the Pro PHP NYC group.

We felt that the other handful of PHP Meetup groups in the area cater to those just starting out more often than not. The engineers who are serious about building professional, enterprise-level applications don’t really have a group where they can consistently expect presentations on those topics.

The focus of the group is less on the basic "hows" and "whys" of PHP and more on things like performance/scaling, optimization, testing and application architecture. If you're interested in joining the group, check out < href="http://www.meetup.com/pro-php/">their Meetup page. There's no word (as of the time of this post) on when their first meeting will be, but it sounds like an interesting group.

If you've ever been to a conference and felt like they missed the target on the topics you wanted to see, Kevin Schroeder, an organizer for this year's Zend/PHP Conference, is asking for feedback from the community as to what they want to see at this year's event.

The primary responsibility I have, as being in charge of content is making sure that, well, we have good content. [...] While ZendCon may have the Zend name in it, it is the conference attendees who determine its success. It is whether or not you, as an attendee, are satisfied which determines my success in determining content. That said, I would like your input on what types of topics YOU would like to see. So if you have an opinion on what would make ZendCon compelling for you please leave a comment.

You can voice your opinion by leaving your comment on his post. There's already some good suggestions and lists for several hot topics around the community right now including deployment practices and community-oriented sessions. The date and the location for this year's event have not been released yet.

Lorna Mitchell has posted an update about the PHP North West conference conference happening in Manchester in October.

Since I last posted here we also published the schedule. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the call for papers and there are some cracking sessions, excellent speakers, and lots of overlap between the two! [...] Finally, this year PHPNW is expanding and has added an informal schedule on the Sunday morning since we know lots of people will be staying over. This will run from 9 til 1 and we've put out a call to ask what people would like to see on the schedule.

The Sunday event (held here) is a time for both current presenters and attendees to cast their vote on topics they really want to hear about (outside of the excellent sessions already lined up, of course).

For more information about the conference or to purchase your tickets, check out the page for this year's event. The deadline for the early bird ticket pricing is September 12th.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

The German PHP publication PHP Magazin has taken a bold step to show their support of things like the Go-PHP5 Project with their latest announcement:

With the beginning of issue 1.08 (coming to the newsstands in November 2007), PHP Magazin won't accept any articles or source codes that cover PHP4 topics or PHP4 sourcecode. Sourcecode delivery must cover PHP 5.2 or greater.

You can find out more information about submitting to this German publication on their website (including several topic suggestions to help get you started).

The German PHP publication PHP Magazin has taken a bold step to show their support of things like the Go-PHP5 Project with their latest announcement:

With the beginning of issue 1.08 (coming to the newsstands in November 2007), PHP Magazin won't accept any articles or source codes that cover PHP4 topics or PHP4 sourcecode. Sourcecode delivery must cover PHP 5.2 or greater.

You can find out more information about submitting to this German publication on their website (including several topic suggestions to help get you started).

Via Lifehacker today, there's a link to a huge list of cheat sheets on just about any topics you can think of, both web-related and not.

Included in the list are several PHP-related ones, including:

• the Ilovejackdaniels.com PHP cheat sheet
• the PCRE cheat sheet for PHP from phpguru.org
• PHP Template Designers
• the symfony project's guide to the framework admin generator

There's tons more where that came from including lots of other web-related ones for CSS, HTML, Javascript and the like. Check out this page on techtarget.com for the full listing.