PHP UK 2011, summary

Taking place in London, on February 25th, at the Business Design Center, this 5th edition was yet another successful one. Read on for a brief summary.

Once upon a time, a frenchy headed to London, to attend one of the major PHP Conferences worldwide : PHP UK. Organized by PHP London, which you can also find on their wiki, and sponsored by, among others, eZ, Microsoft, ibuildings, github, VisonWT, O'Reilly, Zend, the first clear impression was that this event is now pretty mature. A savant mix of grass-roots and business, superb venue and very professional organization. Thanks to the organization team, once again.

On Thursday night, i have had the chance to meet with a part of the Zeta Components team, all deeply involved in the PHP Community : Derick Rethans, Tobias Schlitt (working at Qafoo with Kore Nordmann ), Sebastian Bergmann, as well as the other speakers. A very respectable crew, to say the least, and it was nice to see you again guys !

On the conference day, the eZ Ecosystem was definitely here with eZ's booth ( close to O'Reilly's, see by yourself ) and VisionWT's (hi Tony & Manpreet, "eZ Future" guys), Business Partner in UK. They also published a summary of PHP UK. The globally very orange look of our booth & roll-ups, piles of stickers and a free Training offer in London (initially planned on March 23rd, postponed to mid April, stay tuned if you are willing to participate) seem to have attracted a fair amount of people ranging from "What are you guys doing ?" to "I've tried eZ Publish a few times and wondered how <insert topic question> ?". Always very interesting to see to what level eZ Publish is known within a local PHP community, and a local market. I hope to have infected a few of you who swinged-by with the eZ Community/eZ Publish virus, and am looking forward to seeing you come-by and say hi on share.ez.no. Come on, UK !

The talks were high-level ones, i really encourage you to find a comfortable seat, lay-back, stack your laptop in your lap and open this : http://www.phpconference.co.uk/talks/2011
All talks are available either on slideshare.net either as PDF, and a video is available for most of them. Time for a revival. To name a few :

• "Advanced OO Patterns" by Tobias Schlitt
• "Beyond Frameworks" by Stuart Herbert
• "PHP in a mobile ecosystem" by Ivo Jansch
• "Varnish in action" by Thijs Feryn
• "XDebug" by Derick Rethans

Here are very few pictures from the event, on top of VisionWT's :
https://picasaweb.google.com/ezpublishcommunity/PHPUKConference2011

We will definitely be there next year again. Cheers !