Zend ("The PHP Company") has just secured more funding from TriplePoint Capital based out of Menlo Park, California.

"The market for commercial web-based applications using PHP technologies is growing very fast in all geographies around the world," said Harold Goldberg, CEO at Zend Technologies. "Zend benefits from its strong position in this market, with an expanding list of major companies as customers and partners. We wanted to ensure that we continue our expansion and are therefore pleased to begin this partnership with TriplePoint Capital, a firm whose innovative approach closely aligns with our strategies in the web application market."

Zend is the company behind the popular Zend Studio IDE and the widely used Zend Framework rapid application development platform.

With the successful relaunch of the PHPFreaks.com website recently, Daniel Egeberg wanted to share a little glimpse behind the work that it took to get to that place. In this new blog entry, he talks about the technology, code and design aspects they worked through.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

David Coallier has issued a challenge to all PHP developers in Ireland and in Europe to "stand up" and offer to share their knowledge with others in the local communities:

Now is the time to prove that we are all friends and Open Source Passionate after all. This is something I have been pondering on meeting all technological groups together instead of being divided, but I believe this push from Laura is exactly what Ireland needed in order to make it's outstanding Technological IQ even higher than it already is.

He's talking specifically about one opportunity - the Ireland Open Source Technology Conference 2008 happening in May, 2008.

As announce on the C7Y website today, Andi Gutmans will be presenting a keynote speech at this year's php|tek 2008 conference.

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

In a new post to his blog today, Danial Krook shines a spotlight on a the technology that bridges the gap between two different languages - Java and PHP.

In the time since I wrote that post [talking about PHP with WebSphere], and particularly in the past month, there have been several items published which demonstrate the value of this technology. I still need to delve deeper, but here's a quick summary of what's going on.

He looks quickly at this combination, breaking it out into four parts - what the technology is, how it allows PHP and Java to work together, where you can download the needed software from and some resources where you can find out more information on implementation and examples of it in action.

In the next edition of their IRC Talks series, the PHP Thinktank-ers has posted the logs of the latest discussion for last week - a look at Ajax.

Some of the topics that were mentioned in this week's talk include:

• what Ajax is/who uses it
• javascript libraries that support it
• a look at some of the technology (XMLHttpRequest, responseXML, responseText) that make up an Ajax message.

Be sure to check out the other talks on their blog including a PHP-GTK talk one and a look at the SPL in PHP.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone today, Mike Potter from Adobe has announced an unofficial SDK linking PHP and the Adobe RIA technology for each application development.

Mike Potter our buddy over at Adobe, world class programmer and all around great guy, has announced his latest project The (unofficial) Adobe PHP SDK.

Cal also mentions some of the ways to help out and get involved with the SDK project including testing out the samples in the project and helping to improve the look of the samples already in the project.

You can get complete information about the SDK in this post from Mike's blog.

There's one simple fact in programming - coders love to code. They enjoy getting into the code, getting their hands dirty, and working through the problems to get everything working. After that, however, things can kind of slack off, especially in the area of support. Some projects don't even have documentation to help out with the installation. So, how can you, as a developer, be better about helping your users? Read on in this new A/R/T article (from Stefan Koopmanschap) for a few ideas.

You work on a nice piece of open source software, alone or in a team. You can handle all you want by yourself. You plan everything, determine which features should be included, and of course you support your users. No problem. Until the moment comes that your software actually becomes popular. Popular enough to bring in a lot of new users. They all have questions regarding your software.

Instead of developing all the new features that you thought of, you find yourself more and more answering questions of users. From those questions, you get even more ideas, for instance on how to improve user interaction. But you have no time to work on those ideas anymore. Clearly, you have a need to offer more structured support.

He makes several suggestions of steps to take to a higher level of service to your users, including adding more people to your team and using other technologies (email, IRC, etc) to your advantage. Think about how many projects have channels over on the Freenode IRC network...