After a succesful meeting last month in beautiful Brugge, it's time for a meeting in The Netherlands again! This month, our meeting is taking place in Rijswijk at the offices of Competa, this month's meeting sponsor. And it's not just any meeting. We've got something really special for you this month! »»»

On november 9 and 10, French usergroup AFUP organizes their annual Forum PHP in Paris. Their schedule includes such speakers as Derick Rethans, Rasmus Lerdorf, Francois Zaninotto, Xavier Lacot, Fabien Potencier, Jonathan Wage, Ilia Alshanetsky and many more. Full schedule is available here. »»»

A new local usergroup has started: Rotterdam.php aims to organize meetings for PHP developers from Rotterdam. The first meeting is organized on september 20 in the Mangrove offices, and has two speakers:

• Sander van de Graaf (@svdgraaf) over Advanced CouchDB (querying, map/reduce, fulltext search, CouchApps and replication)
• Joris Verbogt (@silentjohnny) over Node.js

What was done last year is repeating itself this year: All sessions at the Dutch PHP Conference are being put online in a podcast called DPC Radio. This year's edition has just started with Ilia Alshanetsky's session on APC & Memcache. »»»

As has become tradition, the PHPNW usergroup is organizing their annual conference in October. This year it will take place on October 9th, with an informal day of sessions on sunday October 10th and the conference social on friday October 8th. »»»

In the past 5 months, 13% more dutch PHP developers have certified themselves using Zend Certification. This is what research by WEBclusive shows. In the 5 months before this period there was also a 13% growth. WEBclusive concludes from this that the dutch PHP market is becoming more professional, a trend that PHPBenelux has also been seeing in the amount of visitors of our meetings. »»»

As has become a tradition, this year there will again be a Software Freedom Day in The Netherlands. This time the annual gathering is held in Amsterdam, in the CWI. More information is available on the Software Freedom Day website: http://www.softwarefreedomday.eu/