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.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a sort of follow-up to her previous post about accessing the Magento A{I to pull information about products from the application. In this new post she takes it a step further and shows how to get attributes from those products.

I've been working with the API for Magento in recent weeks and I had a bit of a struggle explaining to the V2 API which attributes of a product I wanted to retrieve. Actually I had issues talking to the V2 API at all, but that's a different post so I'll skate over those for now. Instead I thought I'd share (or rather, record for the next time I have the same problem!) how to specify which attributes about a product to retrieve.

She figured out that you could use the info method for the product_catalog call and specify the attributes you want. Her code example shows how to fetch the title, description, a shorter description and the price of an item.

As is mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone, the Adobe Developer Week will be starting up on Monday, May 10th and will offer free sessions for developers interested in learning about Adobe products.

During Developer Week, learn about the Adobe Flash Platform, including Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash Player, and how it integrates with Adobe Creative Suite 5 technologies. This weeklong event features free, live webinars presented by Adobe technology experts. See live demos and have your questions answered by the experts during interactive Q&A sessions.

You can find out more information about the sessions offered and how to register for them on this page of the Adobe website.

If you're looking around for software to fill the needs of your company or group and your sights fall on Open Source software, Builder.com.au has a few suggestions for you to consider.

All open source projects, by definition, provide the end user with certain perpetual rights and freedoms in using, studying, modifying and redistributing the product. However, there is a lot of inconsistency in terms of the product quality, the governance model and the availability of support. Thus, when selecting open source components for your enterprise, it is important to do some background checks to ensure the open source product you have selected is compatible with your enterprise business model and IT standards. Below are 10 questions you can ask to evaluate open source maturity.

Among things on their list to consider are:

• Are the open source licence terms compatible with my business requirements?
• How well is the product adopted by users?
• How is this project governed and how easily can I influence the road map?
• Will the product scale to my enterprise's requirements?
• Are there regular security patches?

Sameer Borate recently posted this new look at hooking your PHP application into the Amazon Product Advertising API to use the updated key system Amazon has put in place.

In this post we will see how to access the Amazon Product Advertising API from PHP. Amazon has recently changed (from 15th Aug '09) the authentication mechanism for accessing their API which must now be signed with your Amazon keys. Unsigned requests will be rejected by Amazon. Note that the code uses the hash_hmac() hash function which is only available for PHP versions 5.1.2 and above, so the code will not work for versions below that.

The full code, including an example if it in action - connecting to the API and searching for the DVD of "X-Men Origins". The full code of his class is included, perfect for cut and pasting.

Matthew Turland has posted the second part of his in-depth series looking the features that the Magento e-commerce platform to the Blue Parabola blog. In this new article he looks at ten product browsing features.

Here's the list of topics covered:

• Multiple Images Per Product
• Product Image Zoom-in Capability
• Product Reviews
• Related Products
• Stock Availability
• Multi-Tier Pricing Upsell
• Product Option Selection
• Grouped Products View
• Add to Wishlist
• Send to a Friend with E-mail

Upon review of all of the above, Matthew has this to say:

The overall feature set is pretty complete for most storefronts. Beyond fixing issues, the Magento platform could benefit significantly -- and quickly -- by improving the quality of their existing features.

Recently, Cormac posted this look at a method for lazy loading on variables in an object with the magic __get method.

I used the magic method __get() to load the images into the [Product] object when they were needed. __get() is called whenever something tries to access a variable that is not set or publically accessible, so basically I used that to load the images whenever some other piece of code tried to access Product::images.

He includes a quick bit of code that fires off an internal private method for the class that loads up the images. In his example, if they're already loaded, it never gets called.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, its parent company, Zend, has launched their Zend Product Online Documentation Center:

You know when you reach that point when you just don't remember where to configure your Zend Platform Events, how to set up your Tunneling, or what that Zend Core extension does? Well the documentation team at Zend have come up with a way to make all Zend product documentation as easily available as possible, so you can all benefit from our wisdom and experience.

The documentation center is a resource for all things Zendy - information on their products made searchable and easy to browse.

Want to try out the next major version of Delphi for PHP? Paul Gregg is looking for volunteers to be testers for the latest version of this CodeGear project.

CodeGear is looking for additional beta testers for the next major version of Delphi for PHP.

Those interested should check out this page and fill in the application to become a tester (just name, email address, experience using PHP tools and how much time you could devote to testing).