It's about that time of year again!

As of 8pm EST this evening, the BarCampDC2 registration is open!

At the time of this writing (09:21pm EST on 22 September), there are less than 150 tickets gone... and they're going to disappear in no time.  If you're interested, you need to move quickly to register and get your tickets.  Sponsors are guaranteed a ticket to get in and with $1000 still required for the effort (maximum sponsorship $250) and the solution is obvious.

No.. quicker than that.

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...

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 Project Importer is available for web2project!

This release can be downloaded here: Project Importer v3.0

• The most significant change in this release is that it has been updated to support web2project. In the process, backwards compatibility with dotProject was lost.
• This is a known situation and is not considered an issue or bug, it is a design decision and will not be reversed or reconsidered.  Please do not ask.
• Simplified the class structure and encapsulated more of the type-specific details away from the user and the BaseImporter class.
• Converted some of the raw SQL statements to use the DBQuery class.

This release can be downloaded here: Project Importer v3.0

I know I've said it before, but this time I'm serious... the End is Near:

web2project is nearing v1.0

We - mostly Pedro - have been pounding on bugs, features, and all kinds of shiny and nifty new bits for the last 9 months.  The most important parts are the UI, performance, and security/permissions.

First, I'm not going to go into the security fixes again, but the permissions improvements are huge.  Not only can you quickly review an individual's permissions by going to the User Permissions Information screen but the system now caches the permissions calculations.  This reduces the overall number of queries on any page by approximately 90%.  Yes, you read that correctly... 90%.

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.