The WebDev Radio podcast has released their latest episode today - an interview with Jeff Carouth (@jcarouth) from last year's ZendCon conference:

I chatted with Jeff Carouth about his day to day worklife as a PHP guy (among other things) at Texas A and M. Learn the A and M mascot name, Jeff's favorite design pattern, and more.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

On his "MySQL Talk" blog Joe Devon has posted a (very) belated wrapup of ZendCon 2011 he attended earlier this year.

I started writing a Zendcon recap post as soon as I got back. And then mis-timed a couple projects. Note to freelancers, make sure your new gig starts AFTER your old gig is over. Or you'll be working an insane schedule. Hence the lateness... First the good part. What made Zendcon special.

He notes that it was a great opportunity to meet people "in real life" that he'd only spoken with online and the overall wonderful experience it was. He mentions some specific people in the PHP community including Juozas Kaziukenas, Daniel Cousineau, some impromptu singing of Queen songs and many more (too many to name here). He also mentions some of the sessions attended including the tutorial on Zend Framework and an uncon talk from Ilia Alshanetsky about optimization.

On the WebDevRadio podcast, Michael Kimsal has posted an interview with Keith Casey from this year's ZendCon 2011 conference.

I got a chance to sit down with (the legend) Keith Casey. Keith's well known in the PHP community with his web2project project (among other things) and is now poised to be a greater force in the worlds of Twilio and the Austin tech scene. Volume is a little quiet here, so turn it up to hear Keith's words of wisdom.

You can listen to the episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly to listen at your leisure.

Two recent summaries of this year's Zend/PHP Conference have been posted - one from an attendee and speaker, another from a member of the Zend team.

In his post Joshua talks about the conference in general - the quality of the talks he went to and the community he experienced while there. He also mentions his presentation, "Puppet for Dummies" and some sessions from the Unconference.

Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend adds his perspective and mentions some of the new technologies that were introduced during the event including their PHPCloud platform and the Zend Application Fabric.

Kevin Schroeder has a reminder for those attending ZendCon this week - don't forget about the unconference and bring those topics you may have not gotten officially accepted to the conference and present them!

If you were looking at the UnCon at ZendCon and wondering what, if anything, you should do, let me give you a couple of hints. The UnCon is the place where people who either did not submit a talk or did not get their talk accepted can sign up for a time to speak and talk on the topic of their choice. [...] It's also a chance for you to get a little practice if you have not spoken before and would like to see what it is like. We recommend that you have either slides, examples or both. It's not "required" that you do, but it definitely helps and it shows that you are treating it seriously.

There are times for full talks (the usual hour-ish slot) or an opportunity for lightening talks (20 minutes long and packed with content) with the possibility of a prize. The session with the highest ratings on the unconference event on Joind.in could win free tickets to other conferences or a copy of the official ZF programming guide. Kevin also suggests a few topics you could speak on that aren't represented in the official session list.

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a ZendCon pre-cap (the conference starts today in Santa Clara, CA) talking about some of what's to come during the week for attendees - five sessions he personally is interested in.

Yet again, it’s that time of year. Later today we have the kick off of the seventh ZendCon (officially called the Zend PHP Conference). This year I’m hitting the event under the php|architect banner as press. It will be my job to cover the good, the bad, the news, the chaos, and generally the things that come from the conference that might change your job on a day to day basis.

From the 70ish sessions being presented over the next few days, he highlights ones dealing with scaling applications with Redis, event-driven programming, dependency injection, character sets and API security. If you have been planning on attending and getting in on some of these great sessions, there's still time - you can still pick up a ticket at the door of the Santa Clara Convention Center.

The folks over at Zend would like to remind you that the deadline for Early Bird pricing on ZendCon conference tickets is coming soon - September 16th!

The Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will be held October 17-20, 2011, at the Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. [...] The conference opening keynote will be given by Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend, who will be joined onstage by Michael Crandell, CEO and co-founder of RightScale.

Other keynotes include ones from Jeff Barr (Amazon), Hugh Williams (eBay) and Dwight Merriman (founder of 10gen). You an find out more about these sessions and lots of others packed into this great multi-day conference over on the ZendCon site. Register now to get the Early Bird pricing ($200 USD off the regular ticket price for the full event).

On the Zend Developer Zone today Cal Evans reminds you about the alumni discounts you can get for this year's ZendCon if you've attended the conference in the past years.

Ah the memories of ZendCon...there are just so many of them. Great session, Keynotes that inspire you to think, and some of the parties can only be described as epic. Alumni, you know what I mean, so join us again and continue the tradition. You know why you should be there, you've done it before and experienced it yourself. So don't put off registering any longer.

The discounts can give you anywhere from $50 USD to $100 USD off the ticket price and if you get tickets before September 10th you can get these discounts off of the already discounted Early Bird prices. You can get your tickets here.

According to this press release from Zend, the registration for this year's Zend PHP Conference has officially opened and speaker submissions were up four-hundred percent from previous years.

Zend anticipates its biggest ever conference due to growing interest in the practical use of PHP to develop cloud applications, which is reflected in the 400 percent increase in cloud-related submissions to this year’s Call for Papers. Strong interest in enterprise mobility, web automation and PHP advances are also reflected in this year’s content. ZendCon 2011 will offer keynotes by industry and enterprise IT leaders, in-depth technical sessions and tutorials, technology previews, vendor exhibits and networking opportunities. The event targets professional developers, IT/development managers, system administrators and business managers interested in PHP technologies and solutions for web, mobile and cloud.

The point out a few highlights of this year's even including topics like cloud infrastructure, RIAs, mobile devices, application architecture and best practices. There'll also be a preview of what's coming in Zend Framework 2.0 as related to its cloud integration functionality. You can learn more about the conference and get your tickets at ZendCon.com.

As was mentioned by Zend late yesterday, the registration for this year's Zend/PHP Conference have officially opened!

The 7th Annual Zend PHP Conference (ZendCon) will take place October 17-20, 2011, In Santa Clara, California. ZendCon is the largest gathering of the PHP Community and brings together PHP developers and IT managers from around the world to discuss PHP best practices and explore new technologies.

The Early Bird pricing will last until September 10th saving you about $200 USD off the price of the ticket. The full ZendCon experience (Tutorials & Conference) is $1,195 USD or you can opt for just the Tutorial for $445 USD or just the Conference for $945 USD. You're in luck if you're looking for discounts, though - they have lots o them including ones for ZendCon alumni, group discounts, ZCEs and students.

The schedule's not quite out yet, but as you can see by some of the comments from speakers on Twitter, it's shaping up to be a great schedule. Topics like CouchDb, component architecture, design patterns, Redis and dependency injection will all be there.