Cal Evans has been referred to as "The Ubiquitous Face of the PHP Community". That's made Cal an obvious choice for the first guest on the PHPPodcast. In this episode we chat about the evolving face of the PHP community.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Cal Evans and Jacques Woodcock sit down with Jon Wage, Director of Technology at OpenSky, and chat about classic first person shooters that got him started in PHP, as well as, a bit about the OpenSky stack.

You can watch the interview over on Vimeo. Be sure to give them some feedback about the video in the comments!

In this edition I talked with Cal Evans, the Icon Of The PHP Community. He is to the PHP Community what Pele is to the Football world, just to tell you about the influence he has on the PHP world. He shares, helps, mentors, propagates PHP wherever and as much as he cans. He was previously Chief editor of Zend Technologies (@Zend), worked for iBuildings (@ibuildings) one of the biggest PHP service companies in Europe where he lead the growth of a PHP Center of Expertise and ex Mister ZendCon (@zendcon).

In the interview questions ask include topics like:

• How he started with PHP
• His thoughts on the good and bad parts of the language
• How he suggests getting involved in the PHP community
• The best PHP book he's read
• What tools he uses in his development
• A framework recommendation
• and how he defines "the PHP community"

For the next few months Blue Parabola will be helping out by managing DevZone. We will continue the 5 year tradition of finding great PHP related content from around the Net and making sure you have access to it. Along the way we may even write some new articles and tutorials. So come back often. See what, Marco, Keith, Beth and I find and share with you.

Keep an eye on the Zend Developer Zone for some great content from this group. You can also check out some of their other efforts over on the php|architect site.

Cal Evans spends some time talking with Scott Gordon (the anti-pimp) about things to look out for and what you need to bring to the conversation. He also references a recent post from Scott with five stupid and five real interview questions

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player or by just downloading the mp3 directly to listen offline whenever you'd like. You can also subscribe to the show notes mailing list to get even more info about this and future episodes.

Come join us for this week's TEK·X webcast as Cal Evans discusses the details of managing remote developers. Cal won't be speaking on why you should allow your developers to telecommute - he has done that already. For those who see the light, however, he will give practical advice on the tools and techniques to use when managing distributed teams.

The webcast will be happening today at 1pm (EDT) and there's still spots open, so if you want to get in on this great session, head over to the gotomeeting page and signup!

In this episode I sit around a table with Keith Casey and Cal Evans as we ramble on a bit discussing the future of PHP (including PHP 5.3 and PHP 6) as well as talking about the framework standards group that has been formed. This was recorded while at php|tek in Chicago, before PHP 5.3 was released.

As always, there's the same three methods for getting this new episode - grab the mp3, listen in-page or subscribe to the RSS to get this and other great past/future episodes of PHP Abstract.

But why was this book released? The answer is that now Zend Framework is one of the frameworks that satisfy the requirements of developers that need to build PHP project. Of course there are other frameworks that meet these requirements, but the team that keeps this project knows PHP and tends to build structures that can make the best use of language and avoid its pitfalls.

The reviewer talks about the contents of the book, giving a summary of each of its twelve chapters (as well as an appendix) and his opinion as to the quality of the book. You'll have to read the review yourself if you want to know how that turns out.

Cal Evans (once again sporting the title of Editor-in-Chief) has this to say about the site:

techPortal is the place where we will talk about PHP. We work on a lot of interesting projects and get to work with a lot of cool technologies. Our goal with techPortal is to share what we learn with the wider PHP community. Our hope is that you will visit often, read about the technologies with which we are working, and some of it will spark your imagination. Ibuildings believe that Information is only valuable when it is shared. When something you read here helps you, make sure and share what you learn on your blog as well.

The portal has launched with the first article from Lorna Mitchell about memcached and how you can use it to make the load lighter for your application.

Here's a few other comments on the launch: the Ibuildings blog and Lorna Mitchell's blog.

Ibuildings recently announced the launch of a PHP Centre of Expertise. The news has been received very positively by the PHP community worldwide. The centre will be led by Cal Evans, a world-renowned PHP expert. He is, among many other things, the editor-in-chief of one of the most important portals for PHP developers. In October Evans will move from his current residence in Nashville (Tennessee - US) to the Netherlands.

The goal of the Centre is to give the PHP community a boost through education, promotion of good coding standards and information about different methodologies (such as Agile programming) and much more. Check out this post on the Ibuildings blog for more information.

Check some comments from David Coallier too.