Congratulations to Michael Kimsal on his book, "the "PHP Job Hunter's Handbook", being published:

I started my "PHP Job Hunter's Handbook" many moons ago, and had interest from PHP Architect last summer/fall about publishing it. After some false starts in finishing it, we wrapped it up several weeks ago, and happily it's 'out there'. Whew!

The book provides helpful hints on finding that dream PHP job (whether it be contract or full-time) with tips on freelancing, "technologies you should know", interviewing tips and some advice from the employers and other PHP developers.

Here's the official announcement from MTA publishing as well as a reminder from Ivo Jansch that the book is currently available for pre-order.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a press review with some good news for PHP developers all over - Zend and Acutate are collaborating to provide reporting (BIRT) to PHP.

he collaboration between Zend and Actuate has resulted in new capabilities in the 3.0 version of the Zend Platform, which is available today for download as a pre-release version at www.zend.com. Zend Platform 3.0 allows PHP developers to quickly integrate reporting capabilities, including charting, to web applications by calling Actuate BIRT reports via the Zend Java Bridge.

New functionality included in this collaboration includes flexibility when generating the reports (output formats/export options), an easy-to-use visual environment, and an integrated charting system including various graphing formats (like pie, chart, area, scatter, and stock).

Check out the full press release for the full story on this collaboration.

Many congratulations to Laura Thomson of OmniTI for her promotion to principal responsible for the "Customer Engagement Experience".

From the official press release:

As principal, Thomson is responsible for ensuring that OmniTI builds and delivers the most appropriate web-based solutions to meet the specific requirements of each client. Thomson's new role has expanded to include guaranteeing optimal quality during every OmniTI customer engagement. This includes ensuring that all client solutions are scalable, highly secure and able to perform on a level that exceeds customer expectations. She is also responsible for growing OmniTI's web development and client services teams as well as internal training.

Laura has authored the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (best seller) and co-authored the book "MySQL Tutorial". For more information about OmnitTI and the services they (and Laura bring to the table, check out their website.

Live from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2006, there have been several announcements about collaborations and new releases that Zend is a part of, including work with Microsoft, MySQL, and IBM.

• A technical collaboration with Microsoft to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server 2003 and the next version of Windows Server, code-named "Longhorn." The cooperative effort aims to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration.
• Zend also announced an agreement with MySQL that will enable it to better integrate the open source database with Zend products, including the option of full integration.
• New milestone releases of Zend Framework and the PHP Eclipse project were announced, along with Zend Studio 5.5 and an update to Zend Core for IBM that makes it compatible with the latest version of DB2 and adds support for the Informix Dynamic Server (IDS). A new product called ZendBox[tm], a fully hosted and managed PHP 5 Technology stack was also announced.

Youo can get complete information on all of these new innovations from Zend on their press release page:

• Information on ZendBox
• Zend and Microsoft's collaboration
• the Zend Product Updates

The Zend Developer Zone has posted some information about some freelancing work that the International Press Association is looking to have done.

If you've got spare cycles and want to help a brother out, read on. I received this from Leonard Rapoport of the International Press Association, (Disclaimer: Zend is a member of the IPA) The IPA is looking for some help. As you can see from the email below, they need a PHP programmer to help them out on some small projects and know of some larger projects they could turn you on it.

Any interested parties should contact Leonard via email and get things started.

Zend has finally released a press release (officially) about their latest certification offering - the Zend PHP5 Certification.

Here's a bit from the official press release (the full content is here):

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, today announced the availability of Zend PHP Certification for PHP 5, enabling developers to test and certify their expertise in new areas such as object oriented PHP programming, creating and using web-services with PHP, as well as PHP security.

Zend PHP 5 Certification was the result of extensive communication with the Zend Certified Engineer community to determine how the program can be most useful for PHP developers. Some of the community's top domain experts have contributed certification questions and reviewed the program to ensure that it is complete and tests for relevant skills. Becoming a Zend Certified Engineer gives developers an edge in today's competitive technology market. Certification also helps enterprise management quickly qualify new hires, and keep current development teams knowledgeable about the latest technology.

They've also announced that they will be offering the certification and classes to help developers prepare for it at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo happening in October/November.

Stephan Schmidt has posted some great news to the PHP-Tools blog today - the O'Reilly book he's been working on "PHP Design Patterns" has been completed and sent off to press.

The work of the last six months is finally bearing fruit and I will be able to spend my spare time on coding again instead of just writing. If you wondered, why patTemplate or any of my other open source projects did not show any progress, this announcement should answer your questions.

I put nearly all of my thoughts on software architecture, OO design and patterns into this book and thus it consists of 370 pages dealing with OO development in PHP 5.1, creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioural patterns as well as enterprise patterns and MVC architectures. Furthermore it covers SPL, Propel and patTemplate to provide some real-life examples of the patterns.

A note to all readers out there, though - the book is in German (despite the English title). If you want to check out a sample bit of code from the book or just want to get more information on it, check out it's website.

According to this new post on Chris Shiflett's blog, his consultancy company has been scooped up by OmniTI, employer of several active members of the PHP community including George Schlossnagle, Theo Schlossnagle, Wez Furlong, and Laura Thomson.

There's also some comments blogged by George , Ben Ramsey, Wez, and an official press release for public consumption. Congrats to all parties involved - definitely a step in the right direction.