The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

New on WebReference.com is this look (part of a series) at working with XML in PHP, this time it's specifically covering the DOM functionality.

With this series of articles, I will try to simplify and demystify the use and application of XML and the DOM. First, we will look at what XML is and then move on to what functions are available for use to manipulate and use XML.

The tutorial introduces XML and gives a sample structure of a document and breaks it down to explain each of the parts. Following that they look at some of the XML-related functionality to create their sample XML file.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog looking at using the MS-Excel Stream Handler class to push your data out to Excel (in more than just a CSV file).

If you're looking for an easy way to output your data from a PHP script into a Excel file, you've got to check out this script which I came across at the PHP Classes site. What this script essentially does is to implement a stream handler interface to write Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files.

Code snippets are included showing how to structure the data for the import and how to push that generated Excel file out to the user's waiting client.

One of the features included in the PHP 5.x releases is type hinting for validating that you have the right values for your functions and methods coming in. In this new post to his blog Ilia Alshanetshy takes a look at the the feature and gives a patch to add it .

On a general level most people agree it would be a good idea to have, since it is an optional feature and does not introduce any regressions, heck you can even mix type hinted code with the non-type hinted one. The "PROBLEM" has always been combining of PHP's typeless nature with type hinting, which is where the consensus has been difficult (impossible) to reach.

He mentions an example of why its such an issue (technically, both 1 and "1" are valid numbers) and includes a link to a patch that gives a new hint to help with the problem.

On the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has posted a look at PHP 5.3 from a slightly different perspective - how development with it affects the management.

At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.

He talks about why you should consider the move up to PHP 5.3 and some of the things you should use to handle (and pay attention to) the migration.