As a reminder, today is the last day to get in talk proposals for next year's php|tek conference:
Today is the last day of the Call for Papers for our upcoming php|tek 2009 conference, which will take place in Chicago between May 19 and 22nd. Don't forget to send in your proposals before it's too late!
You can get more information about submitting a talk from this page on the conference website as well as where to send the proposals and what kind of speaker compensation package they have to offer.
As this new post on the symfony blog points out, their next Plugin Developers Day is happening this weekend on Saturday, November 8th.
Preparations for the coming plugin developers day on Nov. 8th are proceeding apace. I've heard from a number of you who are planning to attend, some planning to start development on new, groudbreaking plugins, others looking to help update existing plugins to work with the latest and greatest version of symfony, and still others just hoping to learn from the lively discussion. All types are welcome!
The event will be centered around the #symfony channel on the Freenode IRC network and is broken up into different sections - creating and releasing a plugin, writing a customizable plugin and coding sprints on new/existing plugins.
Kris Wallsmith has posted an announcement to the symfony blog about an upcoming event (happening Saturday November 8th from 3pm-9pm GMT) - Plugin Developers Day.
We will cover a number of plugin-related subjects in depth, including creating and naming a plugin, adding customizable model, form and action classes, unit and functional testing a plugin, packaging and releasing, and what's new in symfony 1.2.
If you've been meaning to try your hand at writing a symfony plugin or have been writing plugins for years, please join some of your fellow developers for a day of learning, collaboration and development.
Its an online event that'll be happening in the #symfony IRC channel on the Freenode IRC network. Nothing to sign up for - just show up ready to learn.
Chuck Burgess has a quick post pointing out the next "PEAR triage days":
PEAR's next Bug Triage days are this weekend: Saturday 4 PM - 9 PM UTC and Sunday 4 PM - 10 PM UTC.
You can find the schedule and more information about joining in at this page on the PEAR wiki. You can find others working on the triage on the EFNet's IRC network in the #pear-bugs channel.
A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.
The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.
On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabeashares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.
Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.
The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).
After having some issues with spam comments over on his blog, Ryan Malesevich decided to do something about it. So, being the WordPress fan that he is, he implemented a new plugin to help things a bit - removing the ability to comment on a post older than 21 days.
I'm using a plugin called Auto-Close Comments. Whenever you write a post, edit a post, or anything similar to that, it will go through the database and close any comments for posts older than three weeks. I'm going to try it out for a while to see how my spam comments are altered.
You need to install it manually since there's no official packaged plugin for it, but it's a pretty simple matter of cut & paste to get it working. Then, you just define the number of days that you want the cutoff to be and you're all set.
Derick Rethans has posted a quick tip to his blog today:
A friend asked "How do I calculate start (monday) and end (sunday) dates from a given week number for a specified year?" Instead of having to come up with your own algorithm you can simply do the following in PHP 5.1 and higher.
The (technically) three-line code uses ISO format for the date to tell you which day is the starting day of that week and which is the end. He only explains this format just a bit, so if you want more information, check out the strtotime function page.
Good news for those in and around Dortmund, Germany looking to get into PHP and see what makes it tick - the local PHP user group is discussing organizing a "PHP Introduction Day" for anyone interested (as mentioned by Tobias Schlitt).
We generally thought about making a whole day event, where we will teach people PHP basics in the morning and some advanced stuff (like best practices, usage of components, etc.) in the afternoon.
After sharing the idea with a local computer science department, they already have over 50 people interested in attending. If there's enough interest in attending, they have thought about expanding it out into a two-day event, including the development of a sample application as part of the course.
If you're interested at all in taking this course and are in the area, let them know by leaving a comment on Toias' blog.
To all our American readers out there, whether you're really celebrating your independence, or just enjoying the day off work with a chance to play with pyrotechnics (like myself!), all of us here at PHPDeveloper.org wish you a Happy and Safe 4th of July.
