The IKS Project and Liip are organizing a PHP Content Repository Workshop in Zurich, Switzerland on May 8-9 2011. If you're working on PHP-based content management technologies, this event should be a very useful one to join or at least follow.

What is a content repository?

Content Repository is a programming interface for connecting with various persistent data stores. On the Java side, the JCR specification has gained quite a bit of traction, allowing for easy decoupling of a Content Management System from the actual storage implementation. On PHP side there have been several content repositories in use, like Apache CouchDB and Midgard, each with vendor-specific APIs.

The PHPCR effort aims to provide a standard API that can be used by any PHP content management system to interface with any content repository. The first PHPCR implementation is Jackalope, which allows PHP systems to use Apache Jackrabbit as their content store and eventually also will support direct storage. There is also a Midgard PHPCR provider in the works.

As described by David Nuescheler, the advantages of using a standard content repository interface are:

• Functional Definition of a “Content Repository”
• Common Vocabulary!
• No longer learn (dozens of) (ugly) proprietary APIs
• Write (mostly) portable code, for Document Management, Web Content Management, Source Code Control
• Compare Repository Functionality
• No more information silos and vendor Lock-in Content-Centric Infrastructure

If you're interested in the event, please sign up on the wiki page. See also the event on Lanyrd and Liip's workshop announcement.