I'm in Vancouver attending the Vancouver PHP Association Conference 2007. Registration was fast, and I was impressed that we all got a free t-shirt and key chain mini-tool. Why impressed? Because I paid just $100 for my conference pass! The php|works conference in Sept '05 had a registration fee about 6 times this amount, yet no free schwag. Free stuff is just good marketing, plain and simple. Enough about schwag, let's talk about the sessions!

This was the third time I've seen PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf give a keynote, and the subject matter has been pretty much the same stuff each time. Nevertheless, he's a great presenter, and I always enjoy hearing him speak. (I'm pretty sure that was the first time I've heard the word "orgasm" in a PHP talk before. Leave it to Rasmus!) One of the more interesting parts of his talk was about Yahoo's new Pipes project, "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator". I found it of particular interest because I have a similar project in mind that I would like to build with Code Igniter (albeit without that really fancy DHTML-powered interface).

The next talk I checked out was Andrei Zmievski's Unicoding with PHP 6. Unlike some developers, I have not yet faced the challenge of having to internationalize an application, and now I'm hoping I don't have to cross that bridge until PHP 6 is released! Andrei demonstrated what PHP 6's unicode support can accomplish, and it was pretty impressive. It remains to be seen, but unicode support might just be the best new feature in PHP 6.

I left the theatre at the end of the session and headed for room 180 where Steven Wittens gave a presentation on Drupal 5. This talk was of particular interest to me as I have a few upcoming projects that would be a nice fit for Drupal. Wittens is one of Drupal's original core developers, and his presentation style was fast and slick. I left feeling more impressed with Drupal than I had previously, and less hesitant to jump right in and start surfing those dreamy Drupal waters.

By the end of this session, I was very hungry for lunch but discovered that lunch was not being served at the conference. That was only disappointing because I was so hungry–typically, conference food isn't very good anyway, especially the vegetarian offerings. With only one hour before the start of the next session, I quickly found a falafel house, then headed back to my hotel for 15 minutes of chow down before I had to make my way back to the conference venue.

I made it back about 2 minutes into Jim O'Leary's talk, PHP and Web Mapping Technologies. I've got a few projects up my sleeve that use Google Maps, so I was very interested in this talk. It turned out to be a little dry, and I felt that there could have been a better effort to demonstrate the usefulness of these technologies with a Web 2.0 slant, perhaps by demoing some existing websites that use extensive mapping technologies to get us salivating. What I did like was a MapGuide application that Jim showed us that dynamically displays aerial videos of areas on Vancouver Island: the Southern Gulf Islands Atlas. Too bad it didn't include my home of Denman Island! (We are in the Northern Gulf Islands.)

That was it for me on Day 1! I thought about going to Chris Hartjes' talk, What PHP can learn from Ruby On Rails, but I just recently read the companion article in php|architect, so didn't feel I would learn much new from the talk. I also considered Paul Reinheimer's Zend Certification talk, but again I have read a ton about this, and while I like Paul's personality at the podium, I have found his talks to be a little disorganized. It didn't help that the write up about this talk was overly general and didn't give much indication about exactly what would be covered:

I talk about it a lot, teaching monthly, wrote the exam a silly number if times. I have extensive knowledge and can pretty much ramble on as much as you want me to.

Day 2 will start with a keynote by Brian Aker of MySQL, and I'll follow that up with talks on OO Basics, RIAs, Drupal module development and RAD.

Tonight is all about the Canucks! My sister and I will go take in the game at this sports bar that has an LCD TV screen at EVERY table. I'm more of a baseball person myself, but my sister is a hockey freak and a blast to be with, so it should be a fun night!