Brandon Savage has posted some ideas about making conferences better and how they can appeal to a wider (and maybe more inexperienced) level of developer.

I love PHP conferences. I attended a lot of PHP conferences when I was a brand new developer. Zendcon, OSCON, php[tek], Wordcamp Baltimore, DC PHP and others were my stomping grounds. I learned a lot, and the conferences I attended were on the whole useful, beneficial and wonderful experiences. But I also felt challenged by the fact that conferences don't offer much for bringing up new developers with concrete information and training. This isn't necessarily the fault of conferences: it's impossible to truly impart a useful skill into a developer with only a 45 minute talk.

He includes four ideas in the post and talks some about the role of training at the events:

• Are conferences even the right place for training?
• Creating Different Tracks of Different Lengths
• Including Hands-On Training During Tutorial Days
• Offer Learning-Focused Hackathons

He also notes that some of it is up to the developers to find a good fit for what they need and the skills they're looking to learn. There's other options out there besides just the usual conferences, too and, as Brandon states, "investing in your career is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself."

On 7PHP.com today Khayrattee Wasseem has posted an interview with Musketeers.me about their recent move to being the owners of the php|architect brand and all of its products/events.

If you were having a sky-diving on planet Mars since the past months, or if you were too enthusiastic in getting lost within The Hobbit's World - wake up Sid! There's news concerning PHP Land! On "its" 10th birthday, last December 2012, your "PHP Magazine for PHP Professionals" (The one & only PHP|Architect) announced on its portal that it's brand, owned by BlueParabola, is being 'safely & soundly' handed over to The PHP Musketeers aka Musketeers.me for a smooth and more dynamic life.

In the interview they talk about things like:

• The motivation behind the acquisition
• Positives and negatives of the brand as they see them
• Future plans for the magazine and brand
• What they see as the overall goals for php|architect
• What kind of challenges they see in the road ahead

You can read the full interview here and find out more about this change on the php|architect site.

A Kickstarter project has been started up by Alan Forbes to author a book (and full training course) to "bring the joy back" into learning PHP - The Joy of PHP Programming (e-book and course).

PHP is a great programming language. It's free, powerful, relatively easy to setup and learn, and it has extensions and frameworks available to do almost anything you could imagine. Frankly, it's just plain fun too. But if you've never programmed before or have programmed before but not with PHP and want to learn it, wouldn't it be great to find a tutorial that conveyed the sheer joy of it? That's what I want to do!

It plans to be an introductory book, starting developers from the ground up to teach them things like basic usage, project organization, working with user input and bits on frontend and backend frameworks. There's already over 150 backers for the project and just 20 days remaining so if you're interested in learning more about it or want to contribute, check out this page on Kickstarter.com.

ServerGrove has made an announcement on their blog today about an initiative they're starting to help in their own way to improve the PHP training ecosystem across the community - their "PHP Education Initiative".

PHP Training is an integral part of our PHP community and there are a lot of folks providing great training services making the PHP community safer and stronger. ServerGrove has long supported PHP education by sponsoring PHP User Groups and PHP Conferences, but we realised we have overlooked professional trainers. That is why we are pleased to announce our PHP Education Initiative.

Their part in the project is to provide resources (individual VPSes) for each of the individuals involved to give them a solid platform to work from. It's available to students, educator or user group leader involved in a PHP-centric training session. For more information on getting access to this resource, check out the post for contact information and what will be included.

On the Symfony Community Blog Fabien Potencier has officially announced Symfony Live 2012: Paris Edition, a Symfony-focused event that will take place in June.

Today, I'm excited to announce the fourth Symfony Live Conference in Paris. It will take place on June 7-8th; Paris in the Spring is a lovely city! Like last year, we will have two parallel tracks and the conference will be held in English (with probably a few sessions in French). The call for papers is open until March 30th; if you want to share your real-life Symfony experience, consider submitting a session proposal (SensioLabs covers travel and accommodation expenses for foreign speakers.)

As in years before, there will be an unconference and Symfony training sessions will be on the day before the event (the 6th). Tickets are already on sale so if you're interested in attending or just want more information about the event, check out the main conference website.

On the LearnComputer.com site there's a new post comparing the benefits/downfalls of online versus classroom learning of PHP development. They list a few advantages and disadvantages of each.

There can be many factors in the decision to learn PHP online or to take a class in-person, and for some, this can be a difficult decision to make. This article discusses the pros and cons of each method of PHP training to help you find the learning method that is going to suit your needs best. PHP isn't a new programming language, and there is a wealth of information on it on the web for every level of proficiency. The question is whether these resources alone are sufficient to get you up-and-running with PHP quickly.

For the "online" section advantages include flexible schedules and more up to date content. The disadvantages are things like a prerequisite knowledge of using computers/the training software and that the instructor might only have "set hours" to answer questions and offer help. The "classroom" option advantages include the motivation of a regular meeting time and fewer technology hurdles to overcome. Disadvantages include the need for a time/in-person commitment and that the focus might be higher level than needed to appeal to a more mass audience.

As Rob Allen points out, the PHP North West conference is happening again this year and includes a Zend Framework 2 tutorial day session as taught by him.

The fabulous PHPNW conference is back again this year on October 8th and 9th and tickets are now for sale for a mere £72. Buy now! as you only have a few days left at that price. There's no need to wait for the schedule as we know from the past 3 years, that it's going to be a great selection of relevant topics. More importantly, this year there's a tutorial day on Friday 7th October which is also very cost-effective at £330 for the tutorial day and the conference.

He mentions some of the other tutorials happening the same day including a look at Drupal performance and tools, web services and maintainable application development through components. If you're interested in the sessions and what they're about, check out the tutorial day page on the PHPNW website.

php|architect, the people behind the php|tek confernece, have announced a new training event they're holding in Austin to help you hone your OOP skills in a day-long class.

On Tuesday we launched a new initiative called php|architect Live! - a full-day, in-person training course that gives you practical and in-depth knowledge of a specific topic. But there is more: we don't want our Live! events to be "just training courses." We want them to be intimate learning experiences.

As mentioned, their first event happens in Austin on April 20th and will be taught by Keith Casey. The number of seats is limited (20) so if you're interested, check out the tickets page for a more detailed explanation of the class and to get your tickets ($250 USD).

For those that weren't able to make it to either the PHP Unconference Europe or the PHP Days training that followed, Lorna Mitchell has posted her retrospective of the two events, briefly covering her experiences as both an attendee and speaker.

I spend most of the last week or so over in Manchester for a combination of excellent PHP-related events: PHP Unconference Europe on Saturday and Sunday (with a rather excellent warm-up party on Friday night!), followed by the PHP Days training on Monday and Tuesday.

She talks about the voting process at the unconference (the scientific "stickers" method) and her talk that was voted in - "Speaking Tips for Developers". She also talks about the PHP Days training where the members of thePHP.cc presented on best practices, good development, security, etc. (audience's choice).

Client Bucket Workshops is holding another event in New York at the City College of New York on January 29th - "Content Management System (CMS) Design with PHP, Javascript, and MySQL: Learn How to Design a Dynamic Content Driven Website from Scratch or by Using a framework". It's a full day event happening this Saturday.

A website Content Management System (CMS) is a framework that simplifies the management of content published on the web. Smart administrators and individual website owners use content management systems because they save time, money, and when implemented correctly, completely eliminate the need for a webmaster. In this day long workshop we will teach novice and intermediate programmers the basics needed to build and or setup an existing CMS to better manage existing or new web content.

If you're in the New York area and are interested in building up your CMS knowledge (or just want to get started), you can find out more about the workshop here and, if it sounds interesting, register for your spot. With discounts offered off the price of the ticket drops from $125 USD down to around $79 USD - a low price for a day packed full of training.