On the Laravel News site today there's an announcement posted about the launch of the Laracon 2015 conference websites for both editions, in the United States and in Europe.

Today both the Laracon.us and Laracon.eu conference sites have been launched. Both sharing the same style of branding and logo. The US conference will be held in Kentucky on August 11-12, and the EU in Amsterdam on August 25-26. Early bird pricing is available for both and the speaker lineup will be announced at a later time.

The Early Bird tickets for each even come in at just a bit over $300 USD and no schedules have been posted, but that's a great price for either of these two-day events. Each site also has links to subscribe to a mailing list related to the event so you can get the latest updates as they're released.

Derick Rethans has posted about a new function he's whipped up for PHP's date/time functionality to handle the differences between US formatted dates and the British date formats - date_create_from_format.

From PHP 5.3 the new date_create_from_format() function and the DateTime::createFromFormat() factory method are available. As first argument they accept the expected format, and as second argument the string to parse.

He includes two examples - one showing it being used to parse a British date string and the other to show off the date_get_last_errors function that can be useful for debugging.