I've been offered a position at Zend, and accepted it. The official (lengthy) job title is Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief. The short form to many people would be: "The job formerly held by Cal Evans" I'm extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Zend and to have the focus of my daily job to be working with the PHP community which I dearly love. I know that any attempt to fill Cal's shoes will be met with failure, so I hope instead to come up with my own twist on the position and to give it my best.

He'll be acting as the liason between the PHP company and the rest of the community including writing articles, doing some podcasting and all around getting in the middle of whatever's going on in the PHP community. Congrats Eli!

Today I took and passed the Zend Framework certification exam. A possible project involving Zend might be materializing in the near future, and this was a requirement from one of my contractors (OpenIT). Being that they offered to sponsor the cost, I had no reason not take it.

He talks about the test and the testing procedure - one and a half hours long with seventy-five questions in all. Most were multiple choice but some asked for the resulting output from some code. Lots of topics are covered including specific modules and general MVC architecture. He points out a slightly discouraging fact - that the number of "trick" questions seemed a bit high.

I do have some more respect for people holding the certification now (regarding knowledge and experience), though I'm not sure what regard does it hold in the industry.

Sometimes you will need nearly the same functionality in many actions. [...] There are several ways to deal with this, such as moving the code into a separate function, or an action helper. But in this post, I'm going to introduce so called "generic actions" - parametrized, easy to reuse actions - which is an idea similar to django generic views.

His example takes a generic action - one that grabs and output records from a table - and modifies it to take in parameters from the defining function as to which action/controller/model and ID to use. Then this action can be used over and over in multiple places without having to do any copy and paste coding.

When I started the Zend Framework project back in 2005 I was sure that we could make a difference. Some thought it was a long shot with too ambitious goals, after all I wanted to start from scratch without a single line of code, no community contributors and no corporate contributors. We are now 3.5 years later and I have to say Zend Framework's success has exceeded my own foresight and expectations.

He mentions the teams behind the Framework and some of Zend's partners that have helped to make it an amazing success.

We're in need for a full-time, deadline-driven PHP/MySQL developer who is familiar with open source technology, and has a good understanding of the Zend Framework. You must be an expert in PHP, CSS, and XHTML. You will be developing as well as maintaining various projects as needed for an online website built on a modified wordpress platform. A strong understanding of MVC and a strict adherence towards good programming is an absolute must.

You should be able to integrate a customer ticket/support system, affiliate system, and secure ordering system, as well as complete front-end customer interaction programs.

Position Requirements:

Qualifications:

• 4+ years experience building professional web applications
• Proficiency with PHP / MySQL and database architecture
• Zend Framework
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Self-motivated
• Well organized

Valued Skills:

• Prior experience in the social networking industry
• Proficiency with HTML/XML/CSS architecture
• Project planning experience
• Excellent writing and communications skills

Benefits:

• Medical, dental and vision plan
• Retirement plan with profit share
• Project revenue share bonus

Send resume to Mickie Kennedy at zend@ereleases.com

PHP is one of the most popular scripting languages used to develop applications on the web today. As a result, internet.com has a multitude of PHP resources throughout our network of websites. Here are some of our best PHP resources, along with some featured tutorials and out-of-network resources that you may not know about.

The grouping of links also include external resources like the main PHP site and Zend's website.

They'll go over the Zend Framework and the Zend AMF module that allows PHP developers to connect Flex applications to Zend Framework powered applications using AMF. You have to register for the e-seminar to attend.

You can find out more about using Flex and the Zend Framework together in this section of the Adobe website.

As it stands, I've shocked more than my share of people in the past when I've mentioned my stance on certifications for programmers. Specifically, when I have a pile of resumes in front of me, and I'm giving them an initial pass to sort them apart, I take any that mention their programming certifications, and sort them to the bottom.

He justification is that most of the certifications out there are pretty much useless and that, from his experience, those that list them on their resume are using it to appear more qualified.

So what is it that's so wrong with the certifications in the first place? Simply put, they prove nothing to me. They only prove that you could cram and pass a multiple choice test.

But, as he notes, programming is more about art than knowing the order of the arguments in str_replace. He illustrates his other point, "passing - yes but by how much?" with how the Zend Certified Engineer exam is handled. You get a pass or fail and you only know what you didn't do so well on if you fail.

The Adobe technical evangelism team will be hitting the road in October talking about our recent announcement with Zend. PHP developers who are interested in learning about Flex and Zend should join Kevin Hoyt, Danny Dura, Ryan Stewart and Christophe Coenraets as they show developers how to get started with Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and Zend.

Check out this list of locations to find one near you to attend. They run from the first of October through the first part of November.

Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.

They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.