In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone Jayson Maynard reminds you of some of the upcoming webinars from Zend that'll be happening this month. There's four of them in the list:

• Best Practices for Magento Development
• PHP Performance: Principles and Tools
• Zend Server for IBM i in Action
• Simpler Debugging, Better Performance: What's New in Zend Server 5.0

All events are free to attend, so if you're interested, click on the links above to get more information on the session and to sign up.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today, there's an article from Keith Casey trying to set the record straight on some recent benchmarks put together by Zend and Acquia showing the performance of Drupal.

While I have not attempted to duplicate or validate any of their individual numbers or conclusion as a whole, I have been a Drupal user for well over five years and have launched 30+ sites on it.

With this experience to back him up, he points out a few things about the report that either needed work or were misleading in their results. This includes a limitation on the web server configurations they covered, the statistics on Windows performance (might turn people off to using it on this platform) and the emphasis being put in some of the wrong places - optimizing PHP versus Drupal.

He recommends that, like all studies and whitepapers like this, you take the results as only guidelines and examples, not as absolute facts. There's always going to be differences in hardware, software and configuration so what gave the big numbers and results for them might not work for you.

InfoWorld/DeveloperWorld has posted a list of eight power tools (IDEs) they suggest to any PHP developer looking for something more than just the standard text editors.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

There's a summary scorecard on the first page of the article if you want to jump straight to the good stuff, but the pages following that will give you much more information about each of the options - the good and the pad points. According to their overall scores, though, Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio tied it up for the highest rankings.

Arniie had an interesting experience with taking the Zend Certified Engineer test recently - especially once he found an unfair advantage.

So we embarked on a voyage of PHP/Zend (re-)discovery, we booked iBuildings to do a re-examination of our PHP knowledge - a refresher course if you will. [...] In exam euphoria (and depression) [after coworkers had taken the exam] a few questions were discussed to demonstrate the intensity of the exam. I promptly 'googled': "PHP extensions using the dl() function" and low and behold: http://www.exam4test.com/200-500.htm

His google result turned up a page with 20 example questions from the test and the possibility of more just $49 USD more. The site was providing a direct means to pass the test without knowing much PHP at all. He notes that this one thing is enough to disillusion his about the quality and merit of the exam.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's an announcement about the return of Jayson Minard as the Editor-in-Chief of the site (following Eli White's departure).

In early 2006 I launched the Zend Developer Zone (as we now know it) with the intent to "advance the art of PHP." At that time we were also involved in many simultaneous efforts including the launch of the Zend Framework project, and an effort to take ZendCon up a notch. [...] I am now returning to Zend Developer Zone to retake the reins as Editor-in-Chief and once again go after my original goal: To provide a huge value to the PHP community with original, deep, example and situation laden content.

He's rededicated himself to provide the best of the best in PHP-related content to develop a resource that can help developers and those working with the language do what they do best. If you'd like to know more about Jayson, check out his profile on the Zend Developer Zone.

Dennis sent in a submission about a toolbar he's created to work with the Zend Debugger (in an extension) for the Chrome Browser:

Since i have not yet seen an official extension for chrome (or i have not looked hard enough), i created one so i don't have to switch back to Firefox all the time, while I wait for the official extension. It only has the basic functionality (debug, debug next, profile and some configuration options) and it probably has some bugs and quirks, but it functions fine for me.

You can download this toolbar from here and if you have issues installing it, you might check out this post on the Zend Forums.

Vinu Thomas has pointed out two upcoming webinars from Zend that he thought sounded interesting - one talking about development best practices and the other on troubleshooting PHP applications.

From Zend on the development best/worst practices:

Have you ever wondered how you could advance your PHP development? Have you considered using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), an Issue Tracker or a Version Control tool, but were concerned about how complex it might be? Taking PHP development to the next level may be easier than you think.

From Zend on the troubleshooting techniques:

Understanding what's causing your PHP application to be slow or just break is often time-consuming, and almost always frustrating. Join this information-packed webinar, delivered by a senior Zend PHP consultant, to learn what techniques PHP professionals use for pinpointing PHP issues in development, testing and production

There are others happening this month as well including one on internationalization with the Zend Framework and a look at the Zend Server for IBM i.

On the Zend Developer Zone Eli White has posted about a major refresh of the code for the DevZone website including several new features and updates on current ones:

The DevZone codebase has been upgraded today and some new features now exist to make your DevZone experience more engaging!

Updates include notification when articles are published, an update to how comments are posted, syntax highlight for code in posts, twitter integration on multiple accounts and plenty of backend updates to help with the stability and performance of the site in general.

If you'd like to add your own article for consideration, you can submit it here and you'll be notified if it's published.

As Chris Jones briefly mentions and this press release discusses in more detail, Zend and Oracle have joined together to make it even easier for those using Oracle to also use Zend Server as their platform.

This is a first step to making it easy for our customers and users to quickly deploy the Zend software stack without having to go to various websites, download various packages and install them. [...] We now host an rpm package on the ULN [Unbreakable Linux Network] servers called zend-server-repo which updates the Linux OS install to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly.

They've also added it as a package for those using the Oracle Enterprise Linuxyum-installable package. You can find out more of the technical details on the Oracle Technology Network.

Zend's press release can be found here.