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.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the official press release for this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo:

Zend Technologies, The PHP Company, announced today that registration is open for the fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, the world's largest gathering of the PHP community. Leading PHP experts, professional PHP developers, and business managers will convene September 15 - 18 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The theme of this year's conference is "High Impact PHP" and sessions will explore the many ways that PHP is used to deliver breakthrough design, functionality, performance, and scalability in new web applications, resulting in real business advantage for their users.

You can already register for the conference and reserve a room at a nearby hotel of your choosing. Speakers this year include Chris Shiflett, Sebastian Bergmann, Jay Pipes and several speakers on a System i track.

Check out the ZDZ post for a long list of some of the great talks that will be presented during the week.

Zend has another great webinar coming up this Wednesday covering security in PHP applications hosted by Kevin Schroeder.

Security is not just important when you are doing financial transactions - an insecure Web site can be used by others for malicious purposes to launch attacks against other Web sites. There are a few must-knows for anyone who ventures out into the world of PHP Web development. In this webinar, Zend's Kevin Schroeder will focus on the absolute necessities when doing secure Web development.

You can register now and you'll be sent an email on where to go and when you can log in to get in on the conference. The webinar will be happening on July 2nd at 9am PDT/4pm GMT and will last for about an hour.

The PHP Women have started up an article competition of all of those aspiring technical authors out there. All you have to do to enter is whip up something for their Best Practices section:

To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding - here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven't thought of.

At the end of July, they'll take their two favorites out of the articles that've been submitted and hand out perpetual licenses for the Zend Studio for Eclipse software to the winners. Remember, you don't have to be female to participate - they're happy to take in content from anyone and everyone. Just sign up and add your topic to the Best Practices forum to submit - it's that easy!

The Zend Developer Zone has posted one of the older webinars from Zend's "Webinar Wednesday" series to give you a taste of what they're like - Bill Karwin talking about the Zend Framework's database access functionality.

Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on the left sidebar [of the Zend Developer Zone site], you'll see the last five that have been published.

You can also keep up with the latest webinars by befriending the webinarzend user on Twitter. The next PHP-related webinar is coming up on July 2ns and will cover PHP security (Kevin Schroeder presenting).

In a recent post to his blog, Lukas Smith talks about some of the recent advancements and ideas surrounding his emPHPower PHP evangelism organization (in particular a discussion at this year's International PHP Conference.

The fact of the matter is that today they [Zend] are stuck with a job they never asked to take over: They are the only PHP evangelism organization. So if you want to get some material on how to "sell" PHP to your Java loving IT department, Zend is the only real option to turn to. So we have to thank them for filling this void for now.

emPHPower is looking to replace that with a more diverse range of developers and companies that can provide details on a wide variety of PHP-related topics (including using PHP in the enterprise and the best open source solutions for different needs). He's looking to work with more of the regionally-focused PHP sites (user groups?) to help get things up and running in the beginning and then branching out to "the masses", possibly via other means.

Zend will be hosting a webinar this morning for all those interesting in hearing about the new partnership between them and the Dojo framework to bring fully-developed javascript functionality to the Zend Framework.

Zend is excited to announce a partnership between Dojo and Zend Framework. The goal is to deliver a one-stop solution for building rich internet applications with PHP & Ajax. Zend’s co-founder and chief technical officer Andi Gutmans discusses this announcement in-depth on his blog and Zend architect Matthew Weier O’Phinney also provides code samples and more details in a separate post.

The webinar will provide an overview of the integration that's going to happen and a bit of Q&A from those listening in. The event will be happening at 9am PDT/4pm GMT and you'll need to register to save your spot and get in.

Ivo Jansch has been attending the php|tek 2008 conference this past week and some things have come to light about the rumors between Zend and Microsoft. One of his latest posts sheds some light on how Microsoft responded (as answered by Joe Stagner)

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

Obviously, questions were asked about two things - the Zend buyout and whether or not they have stopped talks with Yahoo. The answer to the first was a "no, we're not doing that" and the second was a more vague "we're not done talking to them" sort of answer. Another discussion included Microsoft's contributions to the Zend Core - how they're handled and if they're contributed back.

As mentioned by Ivo Jansch, Andi Gutmans (of Zend) responded to the recent speculation about a buyout of the company in his keynote address at this year's php|tek conference:

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.