Call for Papers

Thank you for your interest in speaking at php|tek. As with all our conferences, our main goal is to provide our attendees—mostly a highly technical crowd who is looking for specific, to-the-point information on relevant developer topics—with content that is as relevant as possible to their daily lives.

This means that, while php|tek is a conference for PHP developers, not all our talks are directly about PHP—after all, PHP development doesn't happen in a vacuum, and there are plenty of “sister” technologies that we, as developers, deal with on a daily basis. Thus, if you have a cool idea about a product or platform that somehow relates to PHP, we definitely want to hear from you!

Topics We're Interested In

This year's edition of php|tek has three main themes:

• Rich Application Development—PHP is rapidly becoming a major player in the world of Rich Internet Applications; we want to show our attendees how they can take advantage of PHP's features to rapidly create and deploy service-based architectures, interact with other dynamic platforms like AJAX and Flex, and generally provide a great development environment for tomorrow's web applications.
• PHP 4 / PHP 5 Migration—PHP 4's end-of-life date is coming fast, and will be much closer by the time php|tek will come around. Many of our attendees will be looking for information, help and assistance in porting their existing websites to PHP 5 with an eye to making sure that they are taking full advantage of its functionality.
• PHP 6—what new features it brings, what it means for developers, and how they can best prepare for it.

Naturally, our schedule will include topical talks alongside a generous sprinkling of presentations on topics that, although not directly related to these two themes, are still relevant to the world of PHP—therefore, feel free to submit as many ideas as you would like, and we will happily consider them all.

Talk Make-up

All “regular” talk sessions are one hour long. You can request that your audience have access to a laptop to fully enjoy your presentation (most attendees bring a laptop anyway); the conference organizers will provide each attendee with his or her personal “web space” with support for PHP 5 and MySQL. If you need any additional tools for your talk, you should specify so in your proposal (that way, our tech team can coordinate any installation requirements with you in time for the conference).

Incidentally, our conferences have featured this type of presentation for a few years now; we call them Bring Your Own Laptop (or BYOL for short) sessions, and have discovered a few tricks to making them successful:

• First of all, BYOL only works with tutorials. Because of the open nature of this kind of talk, you have to be very familiar with the topic and be able to diverge from your study plan in response to questions from the audience.
• BYOL works very well if you set up your talk as a series of short lectures followed by an exercise. Plan to make the solution to each exercise available—that way, those attendees who don't want to write code can still look at how an idea can applied in practice.
• Because your audience will enter the conference room expecting interaction, you must be prepared to be flexible with your slides so as not to fall too much behind schedule.

Important: We do not give preference to BYOL talks over traditional talks when evaluating proposals.

The Talk Trailer

Talk trailers, first introduced at php|works 2007, are a great way to help attendees understand the contents of your talk ahead of time. This will make it possible for them to set their expectations with regards to what you are going to present—and it will help you, in turn, by ensuring that your audience is as fine-tuned to your needs as possible.

The Talk Trailer is a short (less than 5 minutes) interview designed to introduce prospective attendees to your talk. Its goal is to give guests who are trying to schedule their participation at the conference a quick way to establish whether a talk caters to their needs and abilities. The only requirement on your part is to be available for approximately 15 minutes to do a quick interview over the phone or via Internet chat.

The interview follows a highly standardized format (to make sure that all talks are covered evenly), and you will be able to discuss its contents ahead of time with our staff. Don't worry if you have never given an interview before—we'll do our best to make the entire process as smooth as possible.

In-Depth Tutorials

php|tek features an extra day (May 20th) dedicated to “in-depth tutorials” that provide much more in-depth coverage of a specific topic than regular talks. Tutorials are either three (half-day) or six (full-day) hours long, and happen in a more intimate setting than regular sessions; if you plan on submitting a proposal for these slots, please make sure to show that there are sufficient materials to cover the time allowed, and that you are comfortable enough with the topic to answer an increased number of questions (which is a likely occurrence during tutorials).

Speaker Package

Our speaker package includes:

• Complimentary full access to the conference
• A travel allowance (including hotel allowance), based on where you're coming from and the number of talks you're giving
• A stipend for each talk

Submitting a Talk

You can submit a talk by sending an e-mail to the conference organizers. Please note that there is no limit to the number of proposals you can send. When submitting one or more proposals, be sure to include the following in your e-mail:

• A title for your talk
• A brief synopsis (less than 100 words)
• The type of talk (i.e.: regular session, BYOL session, half-day tutorial, full-day tutorial)
• The difficult level (beginner, intermediate or expert)
• A recent bio
• The location you will be coming from
• Your complete contact information (including phone number)
• If available, a recent picture of yourself (highest resolution possible, please).

All submissions must be made by e-mail to proposals at phparch dot com no later than October 31st, 2007.