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Earlier this week my friend and collaborateur Eli White announced the ZendCon 2009 Call for Papers (dislaimers below).  While ZendCon has gotten a little "enterprise-y" in the past with a heavy presence from IBM, Oracle, and similar companies, it looks like they're taking a different angle this year:

We are expanding this year’s conference to focus on the whole development team and lifecycle of your projects. We therefore are not only having sessions on ‘writing PHP code’, but are also emphasizing production processes, frameworks, management information, and the maintenance & tuning of servers.

In the past five years, I've seen the PHP community mature and grow in terms of tools, practices, and goals, so I think this is a natural progression.  Here is the topic information in detail:

• Server / Operations
  • Configuring LAMP stacks, Tweaking Web Server Performance, Using alternative Web Servers with PHP, Databases, etc.
• Lifecycle Best Practices
  • Product Lifecycle, Versioning tools, Managing development teams, best practices for publishing code, etc.
• Frameworks
  • Best Practices, Productivity gains, Cool features, all frameworks
    welcome. Sessions on applications that you've written on top of
    frameworks would be great as well.
• Real World PHP
  • Interesting stories about problems that have been discovered in
    real production environments, and the solutions that were developed to
    combat these.
• PHP Development Topics
  • Performance, Security, Session management, and more. All the things
    that people simply need to know how, in order to have functional
    production quality code.

Zend also wishes to encourage the following specific topics to be submitted in the appropriate tracks above:

• Sessions about experiences using PHP on IBM i5
• Sessions on making Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
• Sessions by ISVs
• Sessions for managers of PHP projects & developers

Sessions will be accepted as 3 hour tutorials, or 60 minute sessions.

ZendCon2009 Call for Paper submissions are handled here...

Disclaimers:

• I've been to the previous four ZendCon's.  I believe my career and friendships have benefited in a variety of ways as a result of attending and being involved.
  
• Last year under the leadership of Cal Evans, I organized the ZendCon Unconference.  I'll be doing the same this year under Eli's guidance and expert ability to distract. ;)
• No, I don't know the presentation selection process, criteria, timeline, or anything else useful.