This fall is quite a busy time, conference wise. This weekend I returned from Microsoft's PDC2008 conference (small report on the PHP related things on the company blog). This week I'll be at the office to catch up with people and to start our PHP Center of Expertise with Cal Evans who had his first official work day at Ibuildings today.

Next week, I'm off to Atlanta for php|works. I will do my 'Enterprise PHP' talk there. It'll be the last time I'm doing that talk. It started as a 25 minute introduction at a Zend business seminar 1.5 years ago, and has since evolved into a book, a series of conference talks and into an upcoming column in php|architect magazine. That stretches the lifetime of the talk, and I'll start working on a whole new topic for next year.

Directly after php|works I'm off to Redmond, where Microsoft has invited a group of people from the PHP community to their 'Web Summit' to talk about things like PHP on Windows, and then from there I'll be flying to Manchester, for the phpNW conference in Manchester. I will take part in a panel discussion, the topic is 'State of the Community'.

phpNW is the first of its kind in the North of the UK, and there are only a few days left to get tickets at the special early bird price of 50 GBP. 50 Pounds is very cheap for a conference of this size. You'll learn as much as in a training course, yet you pay only a fraction. It should be very easy to convince your boss that you should go there, if you are in the UK.

And then I hope for a quiet December month, which gives me some time to reflect on 2008, and to start working on plans for 2009 (exciting things are ahead).

Jeej, my talk on 'Enterprise PHP' has been accepted for this year's Zendcon!

The presentation I will be doing has grown into a sort of companion or introductory talk for my book, describing the life cycle of PHP projects from the early start to completion, including tips on tools to use in each part of the process.

I'm really looking forward to Zendcon. Last year's was great too. A lot of people to talk to, and an enormous amount of sessions. Of course there will be a lot of Zend promotion, but can't blame them for that. They organize it, and we did a lot of Ibuildings promotion when we organized DPC. That's the privilege of organizing.

The only annoying thing is that Zend pays the speaker's airfares in the form of a check. Check's are hardly used anymore outside of the US, and as such, the fees for processing one are ginormous. php|architect once mailed me a check which cost 20% of the amount on the check to clear. Zend: welcome to the internet, please consider electronic wire transfer or paypal.

Registration for Zendcon is still open. You can register here.

I'm happy to announce that as of today, my book entitled 'php|architect's Guide to Enterprise PHP Development' is available.

The book covers the entire development life cycle of PHP projects, and can be ordered through the php|architect website. php|architect has the following description:

"Whether you are running a large scale web app in a PHP-based environment, or if you are considering switching your site to PHP, our new book, php|architect's Enterprise PHP Development will surely be a valuable resource for you and your development team. This book is the only one of its kind and is unparalleled in terms of content and practical usefulness."

I leave that last sentence up to the judgement of the reader, but it's true that it's one of the few books that's not about PHP code, but about the entire development life cycle.

I owe a lot of thanks to Elizabeth Naramore and Marco Tabini of php|architect, for getting this book out.

If you order the book, also check out its companion website. I will collect feedback on that site, and will regularly post errata or other updates.