The sessions at the fall edition of the International PHP Conference have been announced. Zak Greant's keynote will tells three intertwined stories - one that begins with the birth of humanity, another that begins with the age of literate machines and the last that explains the real meaning of Free Software to our society and our future. Along the way, we'll visit ancient god-kings and accountants, long-dead muftis and heretics, blasphemous monarchs and early monopolists.

Lukas Smith's workshop at the conference will go over a number of common challenges faced when writing database applications using SQL. Topic will include groupwise-max, storing hierarchies and similar structures, normalization, thinking in sets, pivot tables, leveraging indexes, data partitioning and many more topics. During the workshop we will look at common mistakes, but more importantly solutions that are established best practices. While most of this talk will be focused on MySQL, other databases will also be covered to some extend.

Hans Lellelid's sessions focus on managing you software lifecycle with Phing and simplifying database-driven applications with Propel. In the session on Phing you can learn why a command-line build tool makes sense for PHP applications. You will learn real-world examples of how Phing can help your project – from packaging, to building phpdoc or running unit tests. This session will also provide an introduction to extending Phing and integrating Phing with continuous integration tools. The session on Propel will introduce the benefits of using an ORM solution in your PHP application, look at specific examples of using Propel to work with your database, and touch on the ways that Propel can be customized and integrated (with Phing) to work with your web application or framework.

The workshop will focus on creating an enterprise software lifecycle with Phing. This workshop will provide a general overview to build tools and how they make sense for PHP applications and then dive directly into creating a build script for a sample project. We will begin by working through some of the more common use-cases for Phing, including packaging directories and files, performing code cleanup or validation tasks, building phpdoc documentation, running PHPUnit tests. Subsequently, we will look at some more advanced topics, including building custom Phing tasks, types, and filters. Finally, we will look at how you can integrate your Phing build scripts with continuous integration (CI) tools such as CruiseControl or Xinc.

Keep reading this space for more information on the conference in the days to come.