UPDATE

Hannes Magnusson, who is responsible for the original change has posted a blog entry in which he talks about why he made the change. He talkes about the fact that he does feel that Conferences are important and has just recently offered up a patch to put a conference teaser on the homepage. He also takes me to task for “making fun of php.net efforts.”

Original Post

Since php.net has had a change of policy and moved conference announcements to a secondary page, we here at DevZone want all our readers to know that we consider conferences to be a very important part of the PHP community. Educating programmers and bringing new programmers into the community is right up there with…well the continued development of the language. Therefore we feel that it’s important that our readers know about conferences so they can support them.

To help support all our friends who work so hard to put together these events, we’ve created 2 RSS feeds to help everyone keep up to date.

Events
Events has announcements about events, special posts about events like speaker interviews and of course, blogs from the event for any event attended by a DevZone “Roving Reporter”. Keep up with all the conference news throughout the year by subscribing to this feed.

Call For Papers
This feed is just for those of you looking for conferences to submit your talks to. As soon as we know about them, we will post it here. Some CFPs announced will be PHP only conferences but we will also try and let you know of any conferences where PHP is a part of. If you’ve ever had the notion of speaking at a conference, you’ll want to subscribe to this feed.

We invite all our friends who coordinate these events to register and post regular announcements about their upcoming conferences and their “Call For Papers”. We want our readers to be well educated so they can make intelligent decisions about which conferences to attend. In most cases these notices will be carried on the front page of DevZone.

Let’s face it, given the small number of events that happen each year even world-wide, that are of interest to the PHP community, both of our conference feeds will be low-volume. There just aren’t that many announcements to contend with. Even so, we will do our best to make sure you know about them.

So if you are looking for all the latest information on PHP conferences from around the world, welcome to your new PHP Conference Headquarters!

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