The button in this example is created after this tutorial http://xeonfx.com/tutorials/easy-button-tutorial/ (yes, I googled "easy button tutorial"). The code and the button it creates are both very simple but the effect looks really nice.

The example code creates a simple round button with a fill color and white text. Their examples show a red, green and blue buttons.

Today's example is about making pretty thumbnails by combining a drop-in shadow with round corners. The image is first scaled down to create a thumbnail. [...] The next step is to round the corners of the image. [...] The final step is to create the drop-in shadow and composite the thumbnail over it.

Both the code block to create the thumbnail and a before and after image to show how it translates in the post.

Chris cites both this News.com article and Zend's own press release on the topic:

The new funds will enable us to expand faster in emerging geographical markets, accelerate our product development and extend the services organization to meet the demands of our growing number of enterprise PHP customers.

He looks at it positively, noting that what's good for Zend is, ultimately, good for PHP - and this is very good for the company.