DragonBe's PHP blog

Today the Dutch PHP company Ibuildings announced in a press release that Mister ZendCon himself, Cal Evans, is going to lead their PHP Center of Expertise.

Cal Evans, Chief editor of Zend Technologies and PHP community icon, shall change his hometown in Nashville Tennessee with his newfound home of Utrecht where he will lead Ibuildings's PHP Center of Expertise and will assist in their trainingsdivision. This is the greatest asset for Ibuildings and a great loss for Zend Technologies.

The PHP Center of Expertise shall focus on stimulating the PHP community on best practises and software enginering skills.

Wether Cal Evans will maintain his devzone articles, his php-abstract podcasts, being the face for ZendCon and his other community roles is not yet known to this point.

ZendCon 2008, the PHP conference organized by Zend Technologies Ltd. was held this year in Santa Clara California. About 700 attendees came to see over 60 sessions (and 20 uncon sessions), with at least 25% non-US visitors (ref. closing keynote by Mark De Visser).

Tutorial Day
The first day of ZendCon is Tutorial Day, where half a day is reserved for talks about a specific topics. I attended the "PHP Developer Best Practices" by Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny for the morning session and "SQL Query Tuning" by Jay Pipes in the afternoon.

ZendCon: Day 1
After the keynote speach "How PHP leaders are transforming high-impact PHP applications", the series of sessions started, including the unconference sessions.

My personal list
"Getting Started with Zend Framework" by Matthew Weier O'Phinney"Scaling PHP applications with Zend Platform" by Shahar Evron"Top Zend Studio Secrets" by Guy Gurfinkel"Elegant ways of han…

Hey you ! If you're a PHP developer and you're in the area of Amsterdam on September 23, be sure to attend a meeting organized by phpGG, the Dutch PHP user group.

The meeting will be held at the Free University of Amsterdam (De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam) in room HG-5A02 and they welcome you at 19.45.

If you care to attend, be sure to mention this on their upcomming page. You can find more details about this meeting on their website http://phpGG.nl.

Rumor has it that they are giving away cool stuff, so be sure to check it out !

If you've been watching my presentations about Zend_Form on SlideShare, here's a little update after Zend Framework 1.6 release last Tuesday.

You start off with a simple contact form in XML. More information about creating this config can be found on my slides about Zend_Form.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<forms>
<development>
<contact>
<action>/is/here</action>
<method>post</method>
<name>contactForm</name>
<elements>
<name>
<type>text</type>
<options>
<label>Name</label>
<required>true</required>
</options>
</name>
<email>
<type>text</type>
<options>
<label>Email</label>
<required>true</required>
<validators>
…

Yesterday evening, while I was celebrating my birthday, the Zend Framework team released version 1.6 of Zend Framework with again a bunch of new features.

Many features that are included in this release were really demanded features by the users of Zend Framework. I just highlight a few of them here.

Dojo Toolkit
Now you can use all the nifty AJAX features right from your framework, so you don't have to load all the library files while you load a page.

Zend Tool
An easy to use command line tool to rapidly deploy Zend Framework projects, making it really easy to create your own skeletons and instantiate all files the way you like it.

File Upload Form Element
If there was a component that was missing from previous versions, it was the ability to upload files through a form component. Well, relax... 1.6 has it.

Captcha Form Element
Now you can add a captcha component to your forms with a breeze. This way your forms will be more or less protected from evil spammers.

WildFire component
For those …