Blackfire.io, the PHP performance profiling service, has announced a series of webinars aimed to help you learn more about the service and how it can help you get the most out of your code. These webinars are spread out all across the globe so anyone can attend at a timezone-appropriate hour.

Here's the list for the October and November sessions:

• [Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session)](Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session))
• Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – European Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – US Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 21st, 2018 – Asian Session)

You can find out more about the contents of each sessions - "Getting Started with Blackfire", "Introduction to Blackfire" and "Automating Performance Testing with Blackfire" - by clicking on the link for the related event. If you're interested at all in improving the performance of your application, check one of these webinars out. Blackfire offers their "Hack" level of support to try out for free too so there's no reason not to give it a shot!

On the Zend blog they've posted an article where Zend's own Cal Evans shares the answers to some of the questions he received from a "unit testing for product managers" webinar.

Thanks to everyone that joined our Unit testing for project managers webinar yesterday. It was great to see so many people engaged and asking questions. I’ve pulled together answers for your questions we didn’t get to on the webcast. If you have more questions, leave a comment below!

If you missed the webinar or want to re-watch it, the on-demand version is now available. The slides are also posted on Slideshare.

The questions he answers touch on topics that include:

• property-based testing
• testing on an existing project (medium or large)
• integration vs unit testing

The final answer covers something shared at the end of the presentation, the resolution to "just do it". Cal backs that statement up with some additional detail and puts it in the mindset of a project manager.

JetBrains has announced a webinar they'll be holding on June 11th at 4:00pm CEST (10am EDT) with host Rafael Dohms covering annotations in PHP.

Annotations are more than PHPDoc comments, they’re a fully-featured way of including additional information alongside your code. We might have rejected an RFC to add support into the PHP core, but the community has embraced this tool anyway! This session shows you who is doing what with annotations, and will give you some ideas on how to use the existing tools in your own projects to keep life simple. Developers, architects and anyone responsible for the technical direction of an application should attend this session.

Space for the webinar is limited, so if you're interested in attending be sure you sign up quickly. There's no charge for the event, you'll just need to provide a bit of information prior to signup.

The QaFoo folks have posted information about a webinar they're putting on for those interested in using Behat for doing functional testing on their applications:

I've already written two blog posts here about Behat: Behavior Driven Development and Code Coverage with Behat. If that made you curious or you wanted to learn about Behat anyway, I can highly recommend to join the free webinar on Behavior Driven Development with Behat I'll be giving on May 8th 2013 on behalf of Qafoo in cooperation with Zend.

As mentioned, the webinar is free to attend, but you'll need to sign up to be able to attend.

Vikram Vaswani passed on a link to a recording of a webcast the folks over at Liip did about using the PHPCR (content repository for PHP) along with the Magnolia CMS.

PHPCR enables developers to use Magnolia CMS within a PHP application. Common scenarios include editing Magnolia CMS pages and creating or updating CMS page properties through a PHP front-end. With PHPCR and the PHP Jackalope implementation, PHP developers can interface with Jackrabbit, the JCR implementation in Magnolia CMS and can connect their Web applications with Magnolia CMS without any special Java training or knowledge.

You'll need to register to view the webinar, but it's an interesting look at integrating this (PHPCR) with a major system to house its content.

Chris Hartjes (aka "The Grumpy Programmer") has made a name for himself in the PHP community as a big proponent of testing of all sorts in web applications. He's taking things to the next level with his own "Grumpy Learning" grouping.

As I also create more products I need a place for them all to live. I have books, and now a course I can teach and I am planning on producing screencasts for sale as well. With that in mind, I am happy to announce I have created Grumpy Learning, an umbrella site for all my training and teaching efforts to hang from.

His first book covered writing testable application, his second book looks more specifically at using PHPUnit. His latest offering is a PHP Testing Bootcamp - a three-session guided look at some of the concepts he shares not only in his books but also from his own experience (January 3rd, 10th & 17th).

On his site today Ulf Wendel talks about SQL injection and some comments that came up during a recent webinar about common MySQL mistakes PHP developers make.

Never trust user input! Injection is a threat . You are the new web developer, aren’t you?. Never trust user input is the first rule I had to learn as a web developer in anchient times. Injection can happen whenever user input is interpreted or used to compose new data. A quick recap of the #3 mistake from todays Top 10 MySQL Tips and Mistakes for PHP Developers web presentation. A webinar recording should be available in a couple of days.

He points out a few "don't" things to avoid - like directly injecting superglobal values into your query and to remember that not all SQL injections are because of escaping issues. The real key? Validating input - be sure you're putting values into your query that are of the correct type and contain what you expect.

If you're interested in the latest release from the Zend Framework project (2.0.0 stable) you should check out this webinar from Zend. Matthew Weier O'Phinney, project lead on the Zend Framework team, will be presenting all about this latest version of the popular framework.

ZF2 is here! Learn the basics so you can get started developing with ZF2 today. We'll cover the basics of creating your first controllers and views, as well as some core principles such as manipulating services and listening to events.

The webinar is happening tomorrow (Sept 12th) at 9am PDT and you can sign up here (Zend login required).

As Tobias Schlitt points out in this recent post to the Qafoo blog, the recording of a webinar he did (for Zend) about "Writing Testable Code" has been posted for listening online.

In this session you will gain insight into the secret of writing easily testable code and you'll learn how this relates essentially to good object orientation.

The recording is just one of many webinars Zend offers on a wide range of development topics, including:

• Design Patterns in PHP
• Multibyte string handling in PHP with the mbstring extension
• Strong Cryptography in PHP
• Using Jenkins/Hudson for Continuous Builds

Almost all presentations also come with PDF versions of their slides attached, too.

Kevin Schroeder is looking for suggestions. He wants to know what the PHP community wants to hear about in upcoming webinars from Zend.

Just wrapped up a call working on our webinar schedule for the year. We’ve got a bunch of ideas but we’d like to also get your input as well. Yes, I know y’all want ZF2 webinars. We have that down. I would also like to do an HTML5 and mobile webinar but I need an SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that. [...] I would also love to have webinars on how to use various API’s, even if there is not native PHP support. So, what kinds of webinars do you want?

Leave your suggestions in his comments along with one already suggesting a "Why PHP?" checklist of sorts to help encourage companies/employers to go with the language.