If you're planning on attending the PHP Master Series (a full-day live webcast "conference" with several notable PHP speakers presenting) and want to prepare yourself for some of the content that will be presented, check out this post on 7php.com with a good preview.

Unfortunately, just like me, you are not able to attend PHP conferences overseas due to so many reasons (travel/booking costs, no day-off from fulltime job..etc). How much of a frustration that is, I don't know for you but for me it's really something very sad! I'm someone who wants to mingle and jingle in those PHP fiesta. [...] In this attempt [to make godo content available to more people], @CalEvans has brought forward a first volume of PHP Master Series. You can read about the announcement from Cal's Blog here!

The article talks about each of the speakers, links to their community interviews (also on 7php.com) and shares some new interview content from each of them about the content they'll be presenting and what they think about the event as a whole.

The PHP Master Series, v1 will be presented on Friday, December 21st and the cost is $50 USD for the full day of presentations and video.

If you've been mystified by regular expressions in the past and want to learn more about their effective use, you should check out these two webcasts from Qafoo - "Black Magic with Regular Expressions" and "Understanding Regular Expressions".

We are happy to announce the availability of my second Regular Expression webinar recording. It was a fun event, which I used to explain all the attendees a little bit more about the PCRE Regular Expression engine available in PHP and some other languages. I am covering some slightly advanced topics, like subpattern options, unicode and backtracking aka. greediness and performance.

You can watch these two recordings over on the Zend.com site:

• Black Magic with Regular Expressions
• Understanding Regular Expressions

For those that have heard about the Lithium PHP framework but haven't gotten a chance to get into it, Engine Yard is hosting a webinar just for you. Nate Abele, one of the core developers for the framework, will be presenting an introduction to the framework on July 26th.

Lithium is a framework for PHP 5.3+ that is focused on quality, speed, and flexibility. It's a set of no-nonsense philosophies and tools that enable you to build better applications, in less time, without sacrificing quality or extensibility. Lithium understands distributed storage and caching, queuing systems, micro-dispatch frameworks, with integrated support for document oriented databases like CouchDB and MongoDB, alongside relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Lithium's architecture allows you to get your application up and running quickly, and still allows you to take control of the framework to support the requirements of your application.

If you're interested, you can sign up for the webcast on the Engine Yard site. The event happens July 26th at 10am PST.

Continuing on with his webcast series looking at using the Slim microframework to create a RESTful web service with JSON Output, John Lebensold takes the code from the previous tutorials (part one, two, three) and adds handling for DELETE to remove values from the data.

This tutorial will show you how to add jQuery RESTful calls for using the DELETE verb when deleting items via a JSON REST interface.

You'll definitely need to check out either the previous tutorials in the series to follow along with the code or grab the current source to see how everything's structured.

Elizabeth Naramore, host of the "Future of PHP" webcast series for EngineYard has put out a call for PHP internals developers inviting ones that would like to chat a bit.

Consider this a call to the PHP Internals team. We've been doing a series of panel discussions over at Engine Yard about PHP-related frameworks and where they are going in the future, but one important piece that's missing is the discussion about the future of the PHP core. [...] If you're a core PHP contributor and you want to voice your opinion in a friendly panel discussion about where you'd like to see PHP in 5 years, then I'd love to chat with you and include you in the discussion.

So, if you've worked on the internals of the language and would like to be in on the discussion, let Elizabeth know by dropping her an email that you're interested!

php|architect has officially announced the speaker line up for what they call their "Cloud Summit", a day-long event happening at the end of November about cloud computing - what it is and how you and your PHP applications can take advantage of it.

Tired of hearing about the ever-so... nebulous "Cloud" and what vendors say it will do for humankind? Yeah, us too. So, why won't it just go away? We found some folks who have used the cloud successfully to strike it big and asked them to show us why it made such a big difference to them. We were surprised, and now we're going to share it with you.

The event is virtual, so you can attend no matter where you are. The cost is $50 USD for a single ticket, $24 USD for php|architect subscribers and $100 USD for an "office party". Speakers for the event include Sean Coates (of Gimmie Bar), Kirsten Jones & Jeremy Johnstone and Marcus Whitney. You can find out more information and register for your ticket on the php|architect site.

In a recent post to the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans points out some webinar recordings that have been made available by Zend as a part of their webcasts series.

There are a lot of webinars out there begging for developers to participate. Many contain quality content that is useful to developers; others, not so much. As a company who builds tools for developers, most assume Zend's webinars are nothing more than ads for their products; this is why we don't assume things. In reality, about 1/2 of their webcasts feature prominent members of the PHP community talking about open source tools that developers will find interesting. Here are a few of the recent ones.

Some of the topics that were presented include using PHP 5.3 namespaces, new SPL features in 5.3, unit testing in the Zend Framework and the powerful combination of the Zend Framework and Doctrine. You can find these recordings on Zend's Recorded Webinars page.

Cal also points out some other webinar recordings from php|architect as a part of their webcast series leading up to this year's php|tek conference.

On php|architect.com today they've posted the recording of one of their webcast series leading to up the tek11 conference from Chris Kite and Josh Butts about Phactory.

Phactory is an alternative to using database fixtures in your PHP unit tests. Instead of maintaining a separate XML file of data, you define a blueprint for each table and then create as many different objects as you need in your PHP code. By using a database factory instead of fixtures, your unit tests will be more clear and easier to write. You'll also be able to change the objects you create programmatically instead of being stuck with the same old fixtures.

You can watch the video (with slides for the presentation) either through the in-page player or by downloading the file itself.

As they've done in years before, the folks at php|architect have set up a series of webcasts leading up to this year's tek11 confernece. This new series includes talks from:

• Josh Butts on Phactory for Unit Testing
• Nate Abele on the Lithium Framework
• Aaron Brazell on Pluggable Authorization in WordPress
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Git Over it

There's registration links for each webcast off of this page so take a look at the descriptions and sign up for those that interest you!

In a new post o his blog Josh Holmes talks about a new series of webinars he'll be doing about combining Windows Azure and the Zend Framework.

My goal, as I'm writing the demos today after posting this, is to go through the Zend Guestbook quick start and then port that to run in Azure and leverage that platform. I'll be posting the full technical write-up here once I get done. [...] It's important to note that this is the first of a series so we're going to do an overview across the board this time and then we'll dive deep into things such as the data access layers or architecting for scaling horizontally across multiple instances in the future.

If you're interested and want to get in on the webinar, you can register on the Zend website. The event will be happening October 20th at 9am PDT.