Kevin Schroeder (of Zend) has posted a new video to YouTube on how to get the latest version of Zend Server up and running on a linux machine in under five minutes (four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, to be exact).

He shows you how to:

• Download the server software for manual download
• Set up some basic configuration files
• Update the needed packages and dependencies (in his case RPMs)
• Grabbing a license from the request page on Zend.com
• Set up some of the configuration through the tool's web-based interface

You can find out more about the Zend Server product on its info page on Zend.com

As Developer.com mentions in a new article, there's a new video tutorial posted over on Internet.com about using PHP and JSON to pass around data in your applications.

Got seven minutes to learn how you can harness the power of PHP, JavaScript and JSON in a powerful AJAX-driven web application? This Internet.com Video tutorial shows you all you need to know to pass data between the client and server using JSON data format.

The video explains a bit about JSON+PHP and shows you how to send a simple message (book-related data) to the server and how to handle the response with a little help from jQuery's Ajax functions.

As a part of the Please Start From The Beginning video series, Andrei Zmievski was interviewed about how he got into web development and PHP.

Please Start From The Beginning is a video series that explores the career paths and experiences of web industry professionals. I was honored to be interviewed for the series along with such interesting people as Eric Meyer, Joe Stump, and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Here's the summary from this episode:

Andrei Zmievski is a web developer and founding member of Analog, prior to this he was Open Source Fellow at Digg and a platform engineer at Yahoo. Andrei is also a core developer of PHP and a member of the PHP Group.

If you'd like to keep up with a daily recap of some of the things going on around this year's ZendCon conference, Eli White, Editor-in-Chief of the Zend Developer Zone, will be posting videos all week long about the event.

He's added T-2 Days and T-1 Days so far and you can keep up with more of the video posts as they come out on this page of the Zend Developer Zone website.

Tiffany Brown has pointed out a video from this year's WordCamp WordPress event - a presentation from Will Norris, "How NOT to Build a WordPress Plugin".

An amazing video from WordCamp Portland 2009 with tips on how to build a better WordPress plug-in. Lots of nuggets about functions and constants that aren't covered in the codex.

You can check out the video here (it comes in at about 45 minutes).

On the ZendCasts site today there's a new video looking at the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework and how it can be used to speed up the response time for things like calls to a web service.

This is part 4 in a four part series on Google Docs and Google maps. While this example shows how to cache a Class to a file, you could easily modify the code to work with other caching backends such as a memory-based caching engine or something like Zend Optimizer or APC.

If you want to get caught up on the series, here's the links to part one, two and three.

Stefan Mischook is back with another video in his series. This time he looks at a part of the Model/View/Controller framework - the Controller.

In this video, I talk a little about the MVC design pattern with special attention to the middle layer in MVC: the 'controller'. [...] The Controller is the part that brokers the communication between the View and the Model.

If you like the video and want to see more, check out the PHP videos section of his website.

Stefan Mischook has posted another video to his KillerPHP.com site today. This time he looks at the Zend framework and gives some reasoning being making it your framework of choice.

In response to my a recent podcast where I recommended that PHP programmers learn the Zend Framework, I was asked why I choose Zend, rather than other PHP frameworks.

He covers what to look for in an MVC framework and why a flexible, well-supported (community) framework can really make a difference.

The Dutch PHP Conference is coming up fast but if you weren't able to attend this year, you might want to follow along with Paul Reinheimer's (interesting) video series leading up to, and possibly during, the conference. He's already posted several from the days leading up to the conference:

• Dutch PHP Conference, Day -7
• Dutch PHP Conference, Day -6, part 1/?
• Dutch PHP Conference Day-6 Part 2
• Dutch PHP Conference Day -5, part 1/?
• Dutch PHP Conference day -4.5 drunken adventures
• Dutch PHP Conference Day -4
• Dutch PHP Conference Day -1
• Dutch PHP Conference Day 0
• DPC - Day 0 Christian Wenz
• DPC Day 1 - Speakers Dinner
• DPC Day 2 - The End

This list will be updated as he posts more videos.

On Stefan Mischook's blog today there's a new video tutorial posted that answers a question several developers have asked him: "Should I always use MySQL for my database when working with PHP?"

Yes, this is a beginners question, I know. Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question that I think is worthy of comment. In answering this question though, I briefly talk about the other database options you have with PHP.

You can check out the video here (in high definition this time!)