In a new post to her site Francesca Krihely starts looking at the developer experience - how developers relate to your service and product and what kinds of things you need to be doing to help engage them.

I had a great brainstorm a few weeks back with the members of the Developer Evangelists meetup on the topic of the User Journey, or as I'll call it now, the Developer Experience. The main problem we wanted to solve was how we convert new users into experts or awesoms users. In many ways, a Community Manager and/or Developer Evangelist is responsible for driving user adoption and making users successful, so this is a topic near and dear to all of our hearts. I walked away with three key things that help improve the developer experience: Great Product, Great Support and Empowerment.

This post talks about the first point - the "great product" - and notes that, if the product isn't useful and enjoyable to use, even developers won't bother with it. She also talks some about the need for quality documentation and how it can be seen as a sort of "marketing" to developers.

Work on making your product fit for an awesome developer experience. If you build it, they will come.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today is Matthew Turland's latest article in his in-depth look at the features the Magento e-commerce application offers. This time he focuses on the promotions and tools that it includes for marketing the site you have installed.

The majority of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.

Topics mentioned include:

• Coupons
• Multi-Tier Pricing
• Customer Group-specific Pricing and Group-specific Tier Pricing
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• New Items Promotional Tool

See the the full post for the complete list (some of which have been mentioned before).

If you're a PHP developer in either the US or Canada, Esther Shindler is in need of your opinions (as mentioned by this post by Cal Evans on the Zend Developer Zone).

A friend of mine, Esther Shindler, contacted me recently to help her reach the PHP community. Since I don't know all of you (I'm really trying though) I'm reaching out to any US or Canadian PHP developers who have 10 minutes to spare and know two or three other US or Canadian PHP developers that might be willing to help as well. Here's all I need you to do: Take the survey and pass the link along to your other US and Canadian PHP developers buddies.

The target audience they're looking for to take this quiz are people working on open source tools in the US/Canada that regularly use one of the following: Joomla, phpBB, SugarCRM, Drupal, WordPress. If that fits you, head over and share your opinions (they might also contact you by phone for a follow-up).

Tim Anderson has posted some of his thoughts on a subject has has been a bit sensitive in the past - Zend's status as it comes to the PHP language.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan on its web site). Is it really? Lerdorf says Zend has no special status. While acknowledging its contribution, he says there are 1300 PHP committers, and only 6 work for Zend. He emphasizes that PHP is a community project and that decisions are made by consensus, influenced by who is actually willing to write the code, not by Zend or any company.

They also spoke a bit about the PHP Development Tools for the Eclipse IDE and where the strong marketing push is in the PHP community.

Brandon Savage has a new look at an old problem in the PHP community - the importance of a developers' understanding of marketing in applications.

Technical people seem particularly bad at marketing effectively. I think this is because we're fact-oriented, focused on the features and neat ideas our products include. We'll spend pages and pages talking about the cool things that our tool or application can do. And then we'll wonder why our client didn't buy it. Why do we do this? Because we forget that marketing isn't about features it's about meeting needs.

He points to the hierarchy of needs as an example of what really has to be considered when developing software. The further down the pyramid you and your software can go, the more effective your marketing can be. An application can do everything under the sun, but if it doesn't do what the customer wants, it'll be tossed aside.

Kamran Usman has posted some of his opinions about Zend - more specifically how he thinks they're headed in the wrong direction, moving away from the spirit of the PHP language.

Zend, the so called PHP Company is heading towards an unfriendly, commercial direction which I don't like. I mean, PHP was supposed to be an open source project, I see more focus from Zend on marketing and selling their commercial development tools, certifications and training kits, and less towards creating a free ecosystem that helps in making PHP a more accessible platform for everyone.

As a specific example, me mentions the recent Zend Server release and how they even contradict themselves in their own documentation. He mentions Zend Studio (Eclipse and bloated) and the Zend Framework (sloppy docs and slow) as further examples of things that Zend has either messed up or has not spent enough time on to make a quality product.

Sandro Groganz has pointed out a new article in the latest issue of the German publication PHP Magazin about marketing open source PHP software titled "Auf die offene Art".

Good source doesn't always speak for itself because the better product does not always establish itself without help. Why is that? This article gives some answers as to how a PHP-based product can be presented well in the market with the right marketing and community as a PHP based product well in the market can be placed through appropriate marketing and communication palatable to potential customers.

You can get your copy of this latest issue (German only) from the PHP Magazin website (with a cover story looking at the DojoX framework).

In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:

I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.

We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.

Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.

After moving on from Mindquarry, Sandro Groganz has decided to start up a new venture to help out the Open Source community - an Open Source Marketing Consultancy.

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

He will be offering services to help Open Source projects become more visible and profitable including creating marketing strategies, branding, positioning, public relations, collaterals and working with social media. He's also providing some of the basics behind it all in entries to the wiki on his site.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans spotlights one of the organizers for the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference - Te Smith.

One of the great things about my job is the people I get to work with on a daily basis. One of the people that make the experience so much fun is one of the "Zend Goddesses of Marketing" Ms. Te Smith. Te is managing the details of the coming ZendCon so I thought I'd call her up and quiz her on the conference.

Because the conference is mere weeks away, getting phone time with Te is nigh-on impossible. However after sufficient supplication and begging, I was granted an audience. Here's what Te had to say when I asked her how things were shaping up for ZendCon.

Te talks about how well things have come together, what to expect at the conference, and some of the keynotes that have been scheduled.