When you’re working with Zend Framework, and code in general, you keep your configuration as much out of code as you can – right? Well, if you want to write maintainable and flexible code you do. Well, if you’ve been working with Zend Framework and Zend Form for more than a little while, you know that it really makes that pretty simple via Zend_Config – well, some of the time.

Invest a click in learning more about Zend Form, Zend Config and how to use the two together to build better applications.

This library contains Facebook oAuth2 Authentication adapter and basic Facebook Graph API library. The project was inspired by two projects on GitHub -> Zend_Auth_Adapter_Facebook and Facebook-PHP-SDK-for-Zend-Framework

Both were lacking either beauty of code or were just incomplete. So after whole day of digging and hacking the code I decided to come up with my version.

If you work (play?) with Zend Framework 1 and Facebook, give this project a try and see if it eases your oAuth pain. As with all good github projects, the author is looking for contributions. Get out those forks and start sending in pull requests!

If you are ZendCon alumni – and there are a lot of you out there – take a moment, stroll down memory lane, and remember ZendCons past. Pick your favorite moment and tweet it to us.

• Tell us who you met. Tell us about the job you landed because you were there.
• Tell us the best session you ever saw.
• Tell us the big memory that sticks out in your mind. The moment that makes you smile and stare off into the distance as you relive it.

Make sure and tag it #zendcon so we don’t miss it.

Tell us your ZendCon highlights and be in with a chance to win PHP swag #zendcon

— ZendCon (@zendcon) May 10, 2012

Many community members have already started down the path but we want everyone to get involved. So take a moment, think back, smile, and then tweet.

Here are a couple of links to help jog your memory.
ZendCon on Flickr
ZendCon on Youtube

…and of course, my one attempt at a video montage:

The commenter is right, it’s a crappy video…unless you were there.

Her’es a quick bite to wet your appetite.

Vagrant is a fantastic tool that enables you to manage and run virtual machines from the command line, including automatic provisioning of them using puppet or chef. The really cool thing about it however from my point of view is that vagrant automatically sets up the VM with a folder called /vagrant that holds the code on your local hard drive from where you started the VM. This means that you can continue to edit your code in your local editor/IDE and test it within the VM easily.

Rob shows you how to:

• Get up and running
• Check out the Zend Framework codebase
• Build your target version of PHP
• Run your tests

The great thing is he also shows you how to have multiple versions of PHP and test against each of them.

It’s a very good interview and gives any PHP developer some things to think about.

Some of the questions asked of Enrico are:

• Things that you consider before choosing a framework for a project?
• Who’s your programming hero?
• What features would you like to see in the next PHP version?

Those are all fine and good but early on in the interview they ask the one question that every developer has to ask him/her self at some point.

Sheldon or Leonard?
I have to say Sheldon but I feel more Leonard, to be honest.

It’s a great interview and a chance to get to know a little more about Enrico, even if you can’t attend php Day.

If you are attending, make sure you look for Enrico and check out his session, “A quick start on Zend Framework 2“.

A long time ago, I set out to write my own blog platform. Yes, WordPress is a fine blogging platform, as is Serendipity (aka “s9y”, and my previous platform). And yes, I know about Habari. And, for those of you skimming ahead, yes, I’m quite aware of Jekyll, thank you anyways.

Why write something of my own? Well, of course, there’s the fact that I’m a developer, and have control issues. Then there’s also the fact that a blog is both a simple enough domain to allow easily experimenting with new technology and paradigms, while simultaneously providing a complex enough domain to expose non-trivial issues.

When I started this project, it was a technology-centered endeavor; I wanted to play with document databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB, and with caching technologies like memcached and redis.

This is a very interesting article. There is a lot of code displayed but no complete project. Quite honestly, if you read the entire article, I’m pretty sure that only a select few would even want to see all of the code. The blogging process he sets out as his “normal” process kind of redefines the word “normal”; but to each his own.

Even though most people won’t be interested in blogging the way that MWOP does, his journey to this process is very interesting; and that s what this post is really about, the journey, not the end result.

Give it a read and then leave Mr. O’Phinney a comment about his journey, his process, or just salute his for all his work on marshaling ZF2.

Each year Zend puts on ZendCon and each year we invite you to participate; 2012 is no different. We are looking for the best and brightest to come talk about what you are working on. If you think you’ve got what it takes, check out Kevin Schroder’s blog post on the topic, “ZendCon 2012 (or, how to get your talk accepted)”

I suggest you take the time to read the entire post but here is the part that you have to know.

The topic areas that we would like submissions to fit into are

• Application and infrastructure best practices/case studies
• Testing, debugging, profiling and QA
• Framework-based development
• Zend Framework 2
• Cloud-based services and cloud-based development
• Server and cloud-based infrastructure
• RIA, mobile and browser
• Databases, storage and data modeling
• Security
• Unsung Tools
• Agile processes and project management
• PHP on the IBM i

While we are on the topic of speaking at conferences, here are a few links to help you if you’ve never spoken before or are looking for some advice.

• Tips on how to get accepted as a speaker at a PHP conference
• Crafting a conference proposal
• How to Submit a Conference Talk
• Podcast: How and Why to Become a Speaker
• Interview with Harrie Verveer

Chew on those a bit, review the topics list, and then click the whoopie button and submit your talk. Trust me, they want to hear from you.

Oh and congratulations to the ZendCon CfP Advisory Panel for 2012!

• Maurice Kherlakian (mkherlakian) – Damn good Zend consultant, but someone needs to suggest a Twitter profile pic for him.
• Ralph Schindler  (ralphschindler) – Some dude who works on ZF.
• Joe Devon (joedevon) – Runs PHP in the land o’ Mickey Mouse
• Chris Spruck (cspruck) – Has one of the nicest looking user group web pages I’ve seen
• Stefan Koopmanschap (skoop) – Does work with PHP via sumphony or something like that.

I know most of these gentlemen personally and if you do too then you know how tough it is going to be to get accepted. Bring your A-game.

Yesterday several news outlets released the news that Zend has joined the Amazon Marketplace and you can now access the Zend App Fabric on a pay-as-you-go basis. Basically, you can now spin up and down instances EC2 with Zend App Fabric without having to purchase separate licenses for each instance. You will be billed for the time you use both EC2 and the Zend App Fabric.

After looking at several of the releases, this is the one I liked the best. WARNING, it is still full of buzzwords and market-speak; developers may want to get someone from marketing to translate. Zend Builds on Relationship with Amazon Web Services, Makes Zend Application Fabric Available Through AWS Marketplace

Here is the obligatory excerpt.

With Zend Application Fabric, enterprises can harness the agility of PHP to quickly and cost-effectively deliver quality web applications on the AWS cloud. Zend Application Fabric benefits PHP applications by providing a dependable, scalable runtime environment. It also provides application monitoring and built-in diagnostics that let developers quickly identify and troubleshoot issues without spending time guessing at root cause and attempting to recreate production problems, and comes with full support from Zend, the PHP Company.

After consulting with more than one marketing person, I found that this translates into “If you use PHP and deploy on EC2, you can now use Zend Server and all its goodies.”

Why do I think that this is important? If you look at where things are headed, this is one more step towards a fully cloud-enabled development process. Now you can develop your applications on phpcloud.com (and if you haven’t started playing with phpcloud.com, you really need to. It has changed the way I look at development more than any tool I’ve played with since Virtual Machines) Once you have code ready to push to production, you can now deploy totally to the cloud as well. phpcloud.com gives you a full instance of Zend Server. You have all the tools that come built into it to use in building your application. Now you can carry those tools with you to EC2 instances, on-demand. I have been developing software for longer than I like to admin and I’ve seen some interesting tools come and go. The Zend App Fabric however is one of the few that strike me as game changers.

Since this isn’t a sales blog but a developer blog, I’ll finish by proving that I have not gone over to the dark side and am not just trying to shill with this post. Send me an @ message on twitter (@calevans)and I’ll give you access to phpcloud.com so you can see for yourself. Maybe it won’t change things at all; maybe it will change development as we know it. Either way, I’d like you to play with it and tell me what you think.

In an attempt to extend the existing functionality of zend framework 2 and provide a powerful view layer for my applications I created a module which integrates the full functionality of the Twig library along with a new extension specific for zend.

That’s the gist of it. The author talks more about why they created the module and gives a little code (and I mean very little) to show illustrate it’s use.

If you are using Twig and are moving to ZF2 9or you are using ZF2 and want to use Twig) This is a module you are going to want to invest five minutes on this article and the related module.

Using one method to read from multiple RSS feeds by using one standard coding method may cause problems. This is because there are different types of feeds. One could be an atom feed and the other an RSS feed, and each has a slightly different XML structure. Using a standard class like Zend_Feed overcomes this problem by detecting the type of feed and returning a standard object.

The quote above represents about 90% of the non-code portion of the blog post. Obviously it is much longer on the HOW than the WHY. It is a short read but if you’ve never looked into Zend_Feed, a good introduction.

Hey, looking for some place to quickly try out that code? @ me on twitter (@calevans) and I’ll give you an invite to phpcloud.com. A few clicks of the mouse and you have an entire Zend Framework development area waiting for you to create something awesome in.