In past years of ZendCon, I would provide day by day coverage of all the sessions, events, people, and chaos.  I began with that mission this year - ZendCon 2008 Day 0 - but quickly realized that way too much happened which I could give justice to.. so I punted and went for the Closing Thoughts..

The Good...

Disclaimer: This is my fourth year at ZendCon.  Although I spoke last year, this year I took a more active role in being the front man for the Unconference.  Special thanks to DevZone Editor and Zend Community Manager Cal Evans for his willingness in accepting my application for the job. ;)

Day Zero of ZendCon has always been Tutorials.  You bring your laptop, camp out for three hours, and see what you can learn.

The ZendCon UnCon selections are still underway.. .the fourth batch of presentations have been finalized. This week has been fast and furious for the final sessions working out.. it's amazing how many people were waiting until the last minute. 
Slackers!

No more ideas are being accepted prior to the conference as we want to leave some room for last minute additions.  This is not the full list. For the full list of sessions, check out the Unconference Wiki page anytime...

First, we have Ed Finkler - the creator of the cross-platform Spaz Twitter client in attendance to talk about his experience with Adobe AIR in creating Spaz.  While not strictly a PHP talk, desktop applications and integrations are appearing more frequently and are often the end points of the API's we create.  Come see the other side of the coin a learn some tips and tricks... or share your own.

The ZendCon UnCon selections are still underway.. .the third batch of presentations have been chosen. The goal is to have about 80% of the sessions chosen before we get there. Yes, this is counter to the usual *Camp-style selection process, but we're competing against a regular conference, so we're bending the rules a bit.

Don't worry, there will be a number of slots reserved for last minute ideas, discussions that stem out of a conference presentations, or adhoc hackathons. If you're attending ZendCon and want to get in on the fun, post an idea, pitch people on it, and see what happens.

Here we go:

The ZendCon UnCon planning is underway.. .the second batch of presentations have been chosen.  The goal is to have about 80% of the sessions chosen before we get there.  There will be a number of slots reserved for last minute ideas, discussions that stem out of a conference presentations, or adhoc hackathons.

With no further ado, here we go:

First, we have Rich UIs and Easy XHR with Dojo and Zend Framework from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.  As one of the lead guys on the Zend Framework and intimately familiar with Dojo, he's going to get into the guts and details of things most of us have been fighting with.  Bring your code, bring your questions, and bring a few tricks of your own.

The ZendCon UnCon is underway...the first batch of presentations have been chosen. With no further ado, here we go:

We'll hear from Ruslan Yakushev about IIS 7.0 URL rewriting capabilities for PHP applications. Most of us know how to do it in Apache with ModRewrite, but IIS is a whole new world with its own rules, concepts, and equivalents. While there aren't many PHP'ers deploying to IIS for production, there are a few and learning an alternative way to look at things is almost always useful. Definitely worth exploring.

We'll hear from Matthew Turland on Web Scraping. While there are lots of organizations who implement SOAP or REST or even CSV, sometimes we have to play with sites that aren't quite so... enlightened? Matthew has some tips and tricks to pull information together and make it useful. If you've ever imported lots of data into a CMS... well, you know the need for this one.