Chris Hartjes has a new (sad) post on his site today sharing news about the True North PHP conference, the "first PHP-centric event in the Greater Toronto Area since 2006" - the organizers have made the decision to end the conference's run after five years.

Why are you stopping the conference?!?"

This is the most common question I've been asked since earlier in the year when my conference partner Pete and I decided that we would run our small PHP-centric conference TrueNorthPHP one more time and then shut it down.

[...] But why did I go along with shutting down such an awesome event. Sure, I could keep doing this another 5 times. But I'm just not wired this way.

He gets into the details about why the conference was started, the work that he and Peter Meth put into the project and why they made the decision to no longer run the event. Chris talks about how his "restlessness" played into the decision and how, despite the conference being a success for several years, it was time for him to move on to another challenge.

Peter Meth and Chris Hartjes, organizers of the popular Canadian PHP conference True North PHP have created a kickstarter for the latest generation of ehePHPants they hope can join the family - the woolly mammoth (complete with tusks and a nice fuzzy coat).

There's no arguing that people in the PHP community love their elephpants. The announcement of a new elephpant being available in a new colour sends people reaching for their wallets or using their network of connections to try and get one (or often more) for themselves.

As the True North PHP conference moves towards it's 4th edition we wanted to create our own unique elephpant to give away to attendees and allow others to obtain as well. So of course we thought of a Woolly Mammoth.

The kickstarter is only running for three more days, so if you'd like a chance to pick up a woolly mammoth elePHPant to call your own, be sure to head over and pledge for your package of choice. There's just a few days remaining and it's getting down to the wire. They won't get made unless the goal is met, so grab yours now!

Peter Meth one of the organizers of the True North PHP Conference (happening at the beginning of November) has a new post sharing some of his experience as a (PHP) conference planner so far.

As you may or may not know I have been planning a conference called True North PHP with my friend Chris Hartjes. I wanted to blog about some of my experiences in planning the conference and reflect back on what brought me here. This blog is especially important to me since this is the first time I am organizing a conference and would appreciate all the feedback I can get. I hope to do several posts over the next month leading up to the conference.

He talks some about his own background in the programming industry and how, thanks to his renewed interest in PHP, he was able to connect with the community and start the idea of a Toronto-based conference. He mentions Confoo as a conference he enjoyed and one that pushed him forward to want something like that locally.

If you're in the Toronto area (or want to visit in early November) and you haven't checked out the True North PHP Conference yet - you definitely should. It's a great two days packed with PHP goodness and tickets are already on sale! (and here's the schedule).

The True North PHP Conference, happening November 2nd and 3rd in Toronto, Canada, has officially announced their schedule for this year's event that includes speakers from all over the world.

Sessions that will be presented at this year's conference include:

• "Your code sucks, let's fix it" (Rafael Dohms)
• "Javascript APIs and the HTML5 Umbrella" (Jake Smith)
• "Cryptography for the Average Developer" (Anthony Ferrara)
• "Practical Solr" (Radek Zajkowski)
• "Getting Acquainted with MongoDB" (Jeremy Mikola)

Tickets are on sale and you can picks yours up for $200 CAD with both days of the event included. For more information, see the conference's main page at TrueNorthPHP.com.

The latest episode of the /Dev/Hell podcast has been released - "Episode 20: Chris Hartjes's Kitchen Nightmare" as hosted by Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler.

This week we talk about how Chris sucks at cooking food, which segues nicely into a discussion of the True North PHP conference that he’s co-organizing in Toronto in November. Thankfully he will not be catering the event himself. We also talk about Ed’s move from doing PHP to Python for day-to-day work, and the plusses and minuses he’s encountered during the transition.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to their feed.