The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

If you're looking to start up that next great PHP project and want a little guidance on how to get the ball rolling, you should check out these helpful hints from Michael Kimsal for launching a new web project.

My background is *not* marketing, specifically, although I've been involved in a number of web projects' launches or relaunches over the last 13 years. Having said that, I've found myself giving similar advice repeatedly, so I thought I'd recap some of that here.

A lot of the suggestions have to do with networking and social media - setting up a twitter account, adding a blog even if the site's not done, gathering emails of those interested - as well as the typical search for feedback and picking the time to launch (even if its not all ready).

Nick Halstead and crew have launched fav.or.it (yesterday), a social site that seeks to "bring blogging to the masses" and runs on top of the Zend Framework.

From their blog:

We have long talked about 'bringing blogging to the masses' and today we have released a new version of fav.or.it which we think moves a quite a few steps towards that goal. We hope that we have firstly simplified the interaction with blogosphere and in turn made it accessible to a whole new audience. And for the more tech aware users we hope we have a raft of features that will also appeal.

Some of the more important things the site can do include conversation tracking, identity management, simple and easy to use searching, integrated commenting and much more. Check out Nick's list for more great features or just make a login and check it out for yourself.

In a recent post to his blog, Michael Kimsal asks a question that I'm sure PHP developers everywhere are wondering - why did Google choose to go with Python as the programming language of choice for their new App Engine service.

TechCrunch is announcing Google's new "App Engine" service being launched this evening. The basic service is a full app stack hosted and managed by Google, providing a web framework (maybe I'm misreading this?) and the Google 'big table' database service. [...] My question is "why was Python was chosen instead of PHP?"

There's been some great responses since it was originally posted including everything from agreement to rationalizations for the move (though there is a fair amount of PHP and Python bashing going on - an obvious occurance).

Padraic Brady has pointed out the "new kid in town" when it comes to magazines about PHP - Enterprise PHP:

There is a new PHP magazine called "Enterprise PHP" available in English, German and French which might even console those missing the apparently ill-fated International PHP Magazine. Back before publication the usual tree of suspects led me to being interviewed for the initial edition published a short while back.

The current issue (which you can get for free after a survey) has articles looking at testing your PHP scripts, how "professional" it is to use PHP and the fact that Java is not PHP (wait, isn't that backwards?)

Zend officially launched a new website (and new branding) over the weekend going for a much sleeker look, but with much of the same content. They've replaced the static graphics with a more attention-grabbing rotating-image homepage banner advertising not only their services but also their products (including the new Zend Studio for Eclipse Beta).

They also included a Behind the Site section that lists the technologies they're using to make things work - Zend Core, the Zend Framework, Zend Platform for the server, the iBuildings Web Development Environment and the Smarty Template Engine.

There's lots more information presented on the front page than before including tabbed sections for business/technical topics and news/events. Head on over and check out the new look and feel for yourself.

As has been mentioned by several bloggers out there, the eZ Components project now has its own official website for the community to center around. It includes updates on the project, documentation and an area detailing the development process and guidelines.

Derick Rethans comments:

he website will be enhanced with other features, such as dedicated RSS feeds, case studies, links to external articles and more. Together with the new website the project also gets a new logo, of which you can see one variant right in this post.

This new logo is on the new website as well as being available for download in a variety of useful formats.

In an effort to help employers/recruiters/etc find the PHP people they're looking for, the PHPClasses.org website has launched their PHP Professionals Directory:

So, I thought to myself, instead of recommending people, I could provide a place where available PHP professionals looking for work could list. Then companies can look up the list of available professionals and contact them directly.

Developers are divided first by country, then by name and have all the contact information you'd need (address, zip, location, phone) to get in contact with the developer. You can also add your own profile to the directory to make it easier for others to find you.

As both Bill and the Zend Developer Zone announce, the latest version of the FastCGI extension for IIS has been released:

Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download from the IIS community site, www.iis.net. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents thehighest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

Bill answers a few key questions - like "is it ready for production?" and "where do I get it?" while the Zend Developer Zone gives more of the background on the path the extension has taken, how it's supported and what sort of future Microsoft has planned for it.

Sam Hennessy submitted a link today to the PRADO Watch blog, a site dedicated to providing some of the latest information on the PRADO framework project.

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven framework for rapid Web programming in PHP 5. PRADO reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters.

Recent updates to the blog include an interview with Dario Rigolin of foxcoverplay.com and several Prado Watch editions. Keep checking back for the latest updates on this great framework.