me @ php|works and zendcon06

The rumours of me being very busy are entirely accurate. However, I haven't forgotten PHP. I've even written some PHP code in the last month (shock! horror!). Next week I'll be attending php|works and presenting on three topics:

• Extending PHP. (3 hour workshop)
• PDO
• Best Practices for Sending Mail with PHP (a new talk!)

For the extending PHP workshop, I'll be pretending to be Sara Golemon, author of the book "Extending and Embedding PHP", who unfortunately couldn't make it in person. I have a copy of her book and have given my own version of this workshop a couple of times in the past, so it'll be almost as good as the real thing :-)

I think I've mentioned the new php-mail-best-practices talk briefly before; a lot of sites send out email, whether its directly triggered from a web interaction, or whether its a scheduled update. For instance, php.net sends mail in response to mailing list subscriptions, bug report submissions, regular assigned bug reminders and so on. In this talk I'll be touching on some good approaches to crafting the email, sending the email and doing both of those things "responsibly" and "managably" (if that's even a word). These last two are particularly important in a world drowning in spam, but don't tend be high on the priority list for people putting together a web site.

I'm also going to be at the Zend Conference this year, giving my PDO talk again. Despite my initial concerns that the conference would be a bit too "biz" oriented last year, it turned out to be very good, so I'm really looking forward to this years edition.

As always, I try to make myself available to the attendees when I'm at a conference; if you have questions that you think I can answer, please don't be afraid to approach and ask me.

I'll see you there if you're there :-)