On their blog, RIPS Technologies have shared a wrap-up of their security advent calendar shared at the end of last year. The calendar provided a daily challenge related to a PHP security issue that may or may not be commonly known.

In this years PHP Security Advent Calendar we published 24 challenges for the PHP community where security issues were hidden in code snippets for fun and training. The challenges are based on real-world security vulnerabilities that we found with the help of RIPS over the last year in popular PHP applications. In this blog post we are going to discuss the main take-aways from our advent calendar regarding PHP security.

The calendar covered several different types of challenges but they fell into a few overall categories: issues with user input, weak typing, odd behavior of built-in features and the overall diversity of possible bugs.

The root cause for the security issues presented in our challenges are not new. But the diversity and combination of these pitfalls are sheer endless that trick even skilled developers. What looks secure at first sight quickly turns into an exploitable security bug. [...] We would like to thank everyone who participated, discussed, and provided great feedback and we hope our challenges helped in sharpening your security skills in a fun way!

If you weren't able to make it to this year's Laracon US conference, the Nexmo blog has shared a summary of the event including some of their own highlights.

I recently attended Laracon in New York City for the 4th year in a row. This year the conference was held at New World Stages in Hell’s Kitchen, with 500 people in attendance (and a waiting list of over 1000!) making it the biggest one yet.

While the conference focuses on the Laravel PHP framework, the talks were diverse and covered topics like database segregation for multi-tenant applications, aesthetic and design tips for developers, advice on growing and scaling a side project into a business, and the importance of deep-focus work.

The author focuses on four of the talks that she found most useful:

• "CRUDDY by Design" from Adam Wathan
• "Custom Laravel" by Matt Stauffer
• "Slay the Beast" from Jeffrey Way

The final talk was actually a keynote from Taylor Otwell himself covering the major changes that are coming in the 5.5 version of the framework including the Laravel Horizon queue management package. Each section comes with details of the session and links to other sources for more information.

For those that weren't able to make it to the Sunshine PHP Conference this year, organizer Adam Culp has posted a quick recap of the event and some of the good, bad (and unfortunately ugly) that happened during the event.

SunshinePHP 2016 was an awesome event! Not only were we sold out of tickets for the 4th year in a row, but the attendee list was truly amazing! Each year more and more companies in South Florida send most if not all of their PHP developers to the conference. This year we saw at least 20 companies in South Florida send 5 or more of their developers, and around 8 of those sent around 10. We love seeing our work take hold, and with this many companies embracing the conference it is obvious we are doing a good job. Thanks to all for participating.

He talks some about the sponsors for this year's event and thanks them for their support. He also mentions some of the keynotes, talks and other activities that happened during the few days and, while there was some complaints about the event attendees overall enjoyed the conference.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a wrapup/review of the WebCampZG conference that happened in Croatia back on October 3rd & 4th (2015). It's "an annual conference for web developers, held in Zagreb on the first weekend of October".

This weekend, Chris Ward (the mobile channel editor at SitePoint) and me attended [Webcamp ZG](http://www.sitepoint.com/webcamp-zagreb-2015-a-conference-you-must-not-miss), the annual international web-oriented conference in Zagreb, Croatia. [...] The conference is a two day event, each day spearheaded by a keynote type of talk before diving into the bulk of the content. The schedules of both days contained plenty of breaks with food, drinks and snacks scattered throughout, providing for both energy and excellent socialization and networking contexts.

He covers both days of the event, talking about the sessions that were presented (including one from SitePoint-er Chris Ward) and the evening activities that followed. Despite some missteps in session content and the wifi - always a problem at tech conferences - Bruno found the event "a blast" and plans on attending in the future.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an article from editor Bruno Skvorc reviewing the latest edition of the PHP Summer Camp conference that recently happened in Croatia.

You’re standing on a long pier, the last ten meters of which curiously belong to international waters despite being well inside the current country’s territory. As you climb the meter-high rock wall that forms a small barrier towards the west, you’re able to witness the sun dipping into the sea, far in the distance. Soft waves caress the rocky surface below your feet, bobbing the sea urchins and fish to and fro. There are other people there, each immersed in their own thoughts. No, that’s not a Dungeons and Dragons session starting. It’s the end of a great conference of workshops in Rovinj, Croatia, in the same spirit as [last year’s](http://www.sitepoint.com/phpsummercamp-review).

The PHP Summer Camp was made up of three tracks - two general PHP and one related just to eZ Publish. Bruno starts with a few of the key take-aways that he learned at the event before getting into reviews of each workshop he attended. He goes through each one describing what the session was about and some of the good/bad aspects he noticed. He also shares a "technical realization" he though of during the event around the use of Vagrant and provisioning virtual environments for the attendees. Finally he covers some of the "extras" like the early morning "triathlon" and evening events.

For those that weren't able to attend this year's PHP South Coast conference (in Portsmouth, UK) Matthew Setter has posted a wrap up of some of his experiences there and what the conference was like.

I’m on the train heading to Stansted airport, after what I can only describe as a brilliant weekend in Portsmouth, attending the inaugural PHP South Coast, conference. I’ve not been to Portsmouth for 10 years, but the wait was well worth it.

He talks about the venue where the conference was held and some of the talks that were given during the day long event. There were two tracks so, unfortunately, he wasn't able to attend all of the talks but he does provide summaries for those he was able to attend. He also spotlights the opening keynote from Cal Evans about the importance of community and how it relates to your career. He ends the post talking about something he found quite valuable: meeting people, both those he knew from online and others just attending the event.

Pascal Martin has posted a summary of the PHP internals mailing list discussions for the month of June.

June 2014 came back down to a reasonable 493 messages on PHP’s internals@ mailing-list, after a month of May with more than 800 mails, including some long discussions about phpng.

He goes over several other topics discussed last month including:

• the upcoming PHP 5.6 release
• the end of life on PHP 5.3
• a discussion around "pickle" (an alternative extension installer)
• the "bare name array" RFC
• the serialization break (that was later rectified)

...and many more. Check out the full summary for more discussions and links to several of the topics and resources involved.

On 7PHP.com there's a new post in their community interview series, this time with Chris Tankersley and some of his experiences at the Lone Star PHP Conference last month.

Welcome to the 7PHP PHP-eatre (theatre) where the screens never tires of diffusing everything that has PHP deep down inside the DNA. Tonight, we'll watch the "after-the-show" of a yummy PHP Conference, named as the Lone Star PHP which took place last week. The screen tonight, features our PHP Rockstar, the Only-and-Only Chris Tankersley.

In the interview Chris answers questions about:

• His background in PHP and the community
• What he enjoyed about the conference
• Some of his favorite sessions
• The presentation he gave (and how he felt it went)
• How the conference was different than others he's attended

Check out the full interview with all of Chris' answers too.

If you weren't able to make it to this year's PHPBenelux conference in Belgium, Michelangelo van Dam has posted the next best thing. In his latest post he shares some of his own experiences with this "epic event".

Past weekend was the 5th anniversary of PHPBenelux Conference and people have known it! With close to 50 speakers, 400 attendees and a massive number of sponsors made this conference a true "epic" event. Not because of the numbers, but because of the social events after each conference day. The theme of the conference was "Carnaval" and like you would expect from any big fair, there were arcade games, money slots and even a huge bumper car stand.

He talks about some of the pre-conference activities (like the speaker's dinner and tutorial session) and then each of the two conference days in turn. He also talks about some of the social activities they had this year including bumper cars.

This event goes in the history books as "epic", "awesome" and "painful" (due to bumper cars). Yes, we've raised the bar for ourselves and it will be challenging to give you all a similar experience next year without repeating what we did this year. Knowing our team, we will come up with something crazy. Follow @PHPBenelux and keep an eye out for our announcements.

If you weren't able to make it to this year's ZendCon conference Michelangelo van Dam has posted a bit from his perspective about the event and the sessions he presented.

ZendCon 2013 is over. I had a really great time there meeting new people, attending great talks and hang out with old friends. And wow, this was an awesome conference!

He talks about his Improving QA tutorial the first day and shares the video about Zend's new API creation/management offering - Apigility. He also talks about this year's unconference (which he managed) and the great talks given there by both known and unknown speakers. He also includes the video of "The Big Debate" about PHP that happened during the lightening talk sessions.