It's July the 8th.

Today I realized that we're exactly one month away from 8-8-8, the final blow to PHP4.

Last december, the community already stopped support for PHP4, but until the 8th of August, at least security fixes would still be done. If nothing has changed in the meantime, and I didn't read any evidence to the contrary, in 31 days from now,security fixes will no longer be provided for PHP4.

We have some updates regarding the Dutch PHP Conference in June (13th and 14th):

1. Conference day - 95% mark reached

95% of the conference day seats are sold. There are a few places left. Register while they are still available.

This week I'm at the php|tek conference in Chicago, organized by php|architect.

I'm happy to announce that as of now, we have a partnership agreement with php|architect! We will be adding the php|architect trainings to our existing training portfolio, which means that php|architects trainings can now also be delivered on-site in the countries where Ibuildings operates.

php|architect is a strong brand when it comes to PHP knowledge, so I'm very proud they teamed up with us!

The official announcement can be read here:

Press release

The latest instalment of the PHP Abstract podcast (hosted by Cal Evans from DevZone) is presented by our very own Lorna Mitchell.

In this podcast, Lorna talks about the process of importing data. Not the actual code you write, but the process in general.

We have finalized the program for the Dutch PHP Conference in June.

Based on feedback from the 'call for ideas' we have added a session on security. It will be presented by Johann-Peter Hartmann, the CTO of Mayflower.

Also, we are happy to announce that Terry Chay, a well-known blogger in the PHP community and informally called the 'PHP terrorist', will deliver the closing keynote. His 'the internet is an ogre' talk has been well received at Zend Conference last year, and we're getting him to Europe to awaken developers with his insightful and controversial presentation.

I was just reading my daily portion of phpdeveloper.org and encountered this article with 4 ways to become a better developer.

The four options discussed might be obvious to most, but I know from experience that they're not obvious to everyone, so I think it's a good read. I especially like the fourth item, on how PHP developers should focus not only on PHP, but also look at Javascript, CSS and HTML. I think it's hard to build an application that consists of PHP only, and even if you have dedicated graphical guru's to do the difficult HTML/CSS stuff (like we do), developers still encounter a fair share of CSS/HTML and Javascript. And in general, it's good to widen your scope and also read about technologies that you might not use directly, but might encounter in the future.

On february 29, the London PHP Community is organizing their annual PHP conference.

I have been a fan since the first conference because they offer an informative program at a very reasonable price (90 GBP if you register now). It's also very easy to attend for Dutch PHP developers, there's a 7.20 am flight from Rotterdam airport that takes you to stansted, where you can take an express train that takes you close to the venue.

To show our support for the conference, and to celebrate the opening of our office in London this year, we decided to proudly sponsor this years conference, together with Zend.

Shameless plug: we are constantly looking for talented senior PHP developers/consultants. If you're interested talk to us at our booth at the conference.

On my personal blog I have written an article about how 2007 was a year where PHP strengthened its position in the business world.

Being a PHP service company, this naturally had an impact on Ibuildings. Our team of PHP professionals grew significantly, and we even expanded our horizon into other countries, starting with the UK. We welcomed many new customers. Some that were already using PHP, some that have only just embraced PHP as a development language.

Chris Shiflett, known security expert in the PHP community, has today started a nice initiative: the PHP Advent Calendar.

Chris writes: "Each day, starting today and ending on Christmas Day, a member of the PHP community will be sharing a PHP-related tip or trick."

Sometimes recruiting efforts yield very nice results.

As of this week, Mikko Koppanen works in our UK team. Mikko is known from his Imagick extension, a wrapper to use ImageMagick in PHP.

The nice thing about this is that now we finally have someone on board who knows how to write PHP extensions.