I am happy to announce that I've just signed a contract with PHP|Architect to write the book 'Enterprise PHP Development'.

It will be one of the first books about PHP that will not cover PHP code. It is loosely based on my 'enterprise PHP development' talk at the Zend UK Business Conference last year. It will cover the entire development lifecycle of a software project, but targeted at PHP development teams. From project management to test driven development and from architecture and design to release management. I will try to cover anything a development team needs to take their development efforts to the next level.

I'm planning to deliver a first version of the book in March, so I hope it will be released in the first half of 2008.

I'm currently working on the rough outline and writing the first chapters. I welcome any input from my blog readers. If there's any topic that you think should be covered in a book about professional PHP development, post your ideas below in the comments. Also, I will be looking for one or two case studies: companies that are already applying PHP in a professional context, and that have moved well beyond the 'scripting stadium'. If you work at such a company and are interested to work with me on a case study, let me know.

On june 16th we organized the first Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The event was attended by more than 250 people and with speakers such as Cal Evans, Kevlin Henney, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and many others, I think it was a great event.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.