On the Zend Developer Zone Eli White has posted about a major refresh of the code for the DevZone website including several new features and updates on current ones:

The DevZone codebase has been upgraded today and some new features now exist to make your DevZone experience more engaging!

Updates include notification when articles are published, an update to how comments are posted, syntax highlight for code in posts, twitter integration on multiple accounts and plenty of backend updates to help with the stability and performance of the site in general.

If you'd like to add your own article for consideration, you can submit it here and you'll be notified if it's published.

According to this new post on i>Andi Gutmans' (of Zend) blog, the vision for the future of Zend Developer Zone (DevZone) has been advanced with the addition of a new team member - Eli White.

DevZone takes an important place alongside Zend Framework and our Eclipse-based tooling as an equal partner in collaboration. Open source companies’ tail wind is the community—and the learning and mentoring environment that comes with it. We have always strived to help support the ongoing process of cross pollination among the community which has truly matured the PHP eco-system as a whole. Professional content, leadership, and expertise associated with the very best practices of PHP are the key to what has made PHP a mature Enterprise-ready Web solution.

He talks a bit about the evolution of DevZone from the "Zend.org" concept up to the current day with contributions from smaller, single developers and larger companies alike. Now, with the hiring on of Eli White into the "Editor-in-Chief" role there at Zend, Andi is looking forward to "the next generation" of all things DevZone.

According to this new post on his blog, Eli White has taken over the post of "community guy" at Zend (a post previously held by Cal Evans).

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!

The Zend Developer Zone has posted briefly about an award that the Zend Framework/DevZone received at this year's Jolt Awards (the "Oscars of our industry).

Both Zend Framework and Zend's DevZone were nominated for Jolt Awards this year. Zend Framework walked away with a "Jolt Productivity Award", for a project that is still in it's 1.x version, this is awesome!

Other categories in this year's event included "Technical Books", "Collaboration Tools", "Development Environments" and the category the Zend Framework was in - "Libraries/Frameworks". It beat out the Eclipse Modeling Project and the Spring Framework for the top spot in productivity.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted this month's Zend Newsletter for those wanting to keep up on all things Zend-ish.

They have kindly allowed me to republish the most recent issue here for your enjoyment. If you want to read it on a regular basis though you are going to have to subscribe. So take a moment and head over to MyZend, login (or register) and on the preferences panel you'll find the checkbox to subscribe. Go ahead, we'll wait.

This edition is just a preview of all of the news that Zend provides each month on its activities, events, product updates, updates to the DevZone, and offers promotions you might want to be aware of.

As Cal mentions, though, you'll need to sign up to get future releases of the newsletter - they won't be posted over on the Zend Developer Zone.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted this month's Zend Newsletter for those wanting to keep up on all things Zend-ish.

They have kindly allowed me to republish the most recent issue here for your enjoyment. If you want to read it on a regular basis though you are going to have to subscribe. So take a moment and head over to MyZend, login (or register) and on the preferences panel you'll find the checkbox to subscribe. Go ahead, we'll wait.

This edition is just a preview of all of the news that Zend provides each month on its activities, events, product updates, updates to the DevZone, and offers promotions you might want to be aware of.

As Cal mentions, though, you'll need to sign up to get future releases of the newsletter - they won't be posted over on the Zend Developer Zone.

For anyone out there attending the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo this week, there's a new post on the Zend Developer Zone site that you might check in on. It has some of the details on how they'll (Zend) covering the event.

We will run a live report from the conference on www.zend.com, and through our blogs, devzone, flickr and del.icio.us. All of you who are at the conference and are creating content about it in any form, please use the tag "zendconference2006". All of you who are not at the conference, check in regularly at zend.com, Zend's blog, Zend Developer Zone, Technorati, Flickr, and/or Del.icio.us.

Cal also comments that you can also tag things with "upcomming:event=111293" on Flickr to let the upconing.org website to catch it and associate it with the event.

For anyone out there attending the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo this week, there's a new post on the Zend Developer Zone site that you might check in on. It has some of the details on how they'll (Zend) covering the event.

We will run a live report from the conference on www.zend.com, and through our blogs, devzone, flickr and del.icio.us. All of you who are at the conference and are creating content about it in any form, please use the tag "zendconference2006". All of you who are not at the conference, check in regularly at zend.com, Zend's blog, Zend Developer Zone, Technorati, Flickr, and/or Del.icio.us.

Cal also comments that you can also tag things with "upcomming:event=111293" on Flickr to let the upconing.org website to catch it and associate it with the event.