In a new article from php|architect Joel Clermont shares a few henlpful hints on what he did to help prepare for the Zend Framework Certification Exam.

While there are the normal reasons to join the bug hunt, and I'll list them below, there's another big reason this month: the top three contributors to this hunt will receive a free subscription to php|architect ! I'd like to thank Marco Tabini and php|architect for sponsoring this excellent prize!

Tomorrow and Friday, 15-16 April 2010, Zend Framework will host its monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework. This year has had a bit of a rocky start -- we skipped the hunt in January due to the pending 1.10 release, and again last month as we started our work on Zend Framework 2.0 -- we'd like to get back into the rhythm again.

New from ZendCasts.com there's a screencast that will help you ajaxify your Zend_Form instance with the help of jQuery .

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new article by Jason Gilmore about how you can use the Zend_Gdata component of the Zend Framework to work with the information stored in Google's "Books" web services.

Eliminating repetition and encouraging code reuse are central tenets of software development. PHP’s lack of multiple inheritance means sometimes there are tough design choices to be made when similar functionality is required in separate branches of the class heirarchy. As proposed in the Horizontal Reuse for PHP RFC, traits offer a means of duplicating functionality in independent classes. In this post, I’ll be detailing an approach that offers trait-like functionality to your objects in an intuitive and straightforward way.

It would be a fair statement to say that I have not paid attention to Flash for several years. Obviously I know that those awesome interfaces for movie web sites are made in flash, as are those annoying video ads that start screaming at you as soon as you load up a page, competing with Megadeth on Rhapsody, cranked out on the 700 watts of power I have in my office. But the last time I really looked seriously at Flash was almost a decade ago and I was thrilled at tweening widgets from one place to another. Unfortunately, there's not really any benefit to tweening a text box. Cool? Yes. Practical? No. So I never really picked it up. Plus I was cheap. That is the reason why I had not really been paying attention to Flash for the past several years. I generally don't look into something if it's cool. I look into something if it is practical. Flash, generally, is meant to be, well, flashy. And it is. But for someone such as myself, I didn't think I had much of a reason to pay attention. Until now...

The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of two versions of Zend Framework: 1.10.3 and 1.9.8. In addition to around 80 bugfixes between them, these two releases are security releases. You may download it from the Zend Framework site . A couple weeks ago, the Dojo Foundation announced a security advisory regarding Dojo Toolkit , which Zend Framework bundles in its releases. The new releases of Zend Framework incorporate the updates made to Dojo Toolkit.

As a follow-up to his previous post on Zend_Navigation Brandon Savage takes a look at how to make it more useful by using some of the methods that come bundled with the component.

Quentin Zervaas has written a new article on PhpRiot about using the Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 component of the Zend Framework. The article discusses how to manage buckets and objects within buckets, as well as how to use Amazon S3 as a Content Delivery Network for your own web sites.

Kevin van Zonneveld has written up a new post for his blog today looking at using Redis in your application for caching information (similar to memcache).

In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage takes a quick loook at hos he integrated Propel into a Zend Framework app he'd built to replace an older site.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Ivo Jansch takes a look at a type formatter they've created to work with Zend Studio to more correctly format your code as per the official coding standard for the Zend Framework.

Recently Brandon Savage has been really getting into the Zend Framework and creating applications with it. He, like many other developers just starting out with this framework, has had his share of frustrations. In the latest post to his blog Brandon looks at some of these first steps and what he's learned from them.

In a new post today Raphael Stolt shows you how to use MongoHq , a cloud-based hosting service, to host a Zend Framework application that uses the MongoDb as a backend. The tutorial focuses on the bootstrapping process to make the framework play nicely with its hosting environment.

Matthew wrote up an article on modules in Zend_Application and that got me thinking a little bit. When I have done training for Zend Framework, one of the things that mystifies students to some extent is the whole plugin architecture and where things can go. There has been several articles written about it, but they tend to use code to describe it. I was only able to find a small handfull of articles that used some kind of chart to describe what goes on. Not that that's a problem, but I had found that when I drew out the request lifecycle that it helped the students understand it better.

Pablo Viquez has put together something that all of the Windows-based Zend Framework developers might find very useful during their next offline (or online, really) development session - a Windows Help file version of the Zend Framework manual.

Joseph Crawford has a new post to his blog today with a look at his use of the Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route components of the Zend Framework to create a simple REST service .

Zend Framework 1.10 sports a ton of new features, as well as completely revamped online documentation. In this webinar, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Framework Project Lead, and Ralph Schindler, Zend Framework Software Engineer, will present a synopsis of the new features, discuss the new online documentation system and how it’s built, and answer your questions about the new release….

To be successful, larger Drupal sites face key issues of site performance and scalability. This webinar is targeted at managers and developers who are trying to get the most out of a Drupal site. We’ll discuss common Drupal performance bottlenecks and a number of techniques to dramatically improve site performance. A detailed review of recent performance and stress testing will highlight PHP opt…