Rich Zygler has blogged about a trend he's been seeing that will make just about every PHP developer's eyes light up - the market for qualified PHP programmers has taken off dramatically.

While there are lots of PHP jobs in the usual suspects like small start-ups, there also seem to be a number of jobs at established companies and developer shops. I'm also seeing a definite split in PHP jobs where there are both entry level jobs as well as jobs for more experienced people with titles like "Senior PHP Developer" and "PHP Tech Lead."

He notes that the requirements for the jobs are just as diverse as the companies looking for candidates. Some want framework developers (like with the Zend Framework or Symfony) and some are looking for the "jack of all trades" sort of PHP developer that is flexible and experienced.

If you happen to be looking for a job, you can also check out our jobs section to find recently added positions.

Cal Evans has posted a list of all of the Twitter-ers (?) out there in the PHP community and links to their pages.

The PHP community has an active twitter presence. If you use twitter, come and join us. Here I've listed all of the community memeber's accounts that I have and that have given me permission to.

Scroll on down the list, see who you haven't already added and check out their Twitter page - then following is just a click away!

Ken Guest has a quick note about another "planet" site that's been started up for the PHP community - Planet.php.ie:

After a bit of discussion on the php.ie mailing list, Kae Verens and David Coallier set up http://planet.php.ie to bundle together blog postings from people within the Irish PHP community - a big thank you is deserved for them.

There's currently five bloggers added to the planet so if you'd like to be added, either contact Ken or Kae.

On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new tutorial showing how to install the PHP-GTK platform to a Mac OS X machine:

Installation of PHP-GTK 2 on MacOS X 10.4 and 10.5 is actually pretty simple, as it can use the latest PHP-GTK installer, which works just like any other Mac installer.

They include screenshots as a guide to the step-by-step (extremely simple) process of getting the software installed.

For those interested in technical details, a complete list of the prerequisites is given at step 2 of the installation. Download the installer at http://www.kix.in/php-gtk2/PHP-GTK-2.0.0.dmg

Doug Hill has posted his response to Lukas Smith's emPHPower movement:

I have been a member of a much smaller organization which adopted a similar mission. The reputation and livelihoods of this group had been damaged by years of infighting, bad legislation and no clear vision of of the future, not all of these are problems we face in the PHP community but the concepts behind organization are the same.

He notes that, being part of such groups previously, there are a few dos and don'ts to follow, specifically when it comes to community involvement.

On his blog, Padraic Brady has posted his thoughts on the Zend Framework and what the latest release of it, ZF v1.5, means for its future in the web development world.

With 1.5, everything that makes the framework attractive has quite simply been boosted. We now have a fully comprehensive complex view aggregation/templating system to play with, we have a forms component, translations are integrated as view helpers. Just rattling off several new features is enough to pull together just how comprehensive and cohesive the framework has become over it's 1.0 predecessor. It's that significant.

He talks about things like Zend_Layout and additions to Zend_Form as well as the community around the framework and some of the places that the framework and its process are still lacking a bit.

In a moment of divine inspiration (well, at least a thought that passed through his head at the bus stop), Lukas Smith has thought up and is proposing a group to help promote and advocate PHP, one he calls emPHPower.

emPHPower should be a mediator between various (potential) participants in the PHP world. As such emPHPower could serve as a mediator between the PHP.net developers and its user base, between corporations and PHP.net, between corporations and grass roots organizers etc. [...] There are is fundamental concept that I see in this vision: emPHPower is a mediator and catalyst that empowers members of the community to follow their own ideas.

He talks more about the actual "doing" of his ideas and mentions things like the project's budget and where it would come from - the possibility of member fees (based somehow on cost of living).

Besides the more official list of projects happening for this year's Google Summer of Code, there's also been a lot of buzz in the community about the projects and calls for developers to help out on their project of choice. Here's just a few:

• Jay Pipes on some of the projects for MySQL Forge
• The PHP-GTK Community site on their project
• Marcus Borger encouraging participation in this year's GSoC
• Sara Golemon's pointing developers in the right direction
• A proposal from the thyphp.com site for a WordPress category suggestor
• Derick Rethans mentioning his "pet peeve", the optimizer for APC
• Elizabeth Smith promoting participation in any of the list of ideas

Keep up to date on the happenings on each of the projects in the PHP group on this page on the PHP.net wiki.

As announce on the C7Y website today, Andi Gutmans will be presenting a keynote speech at this year's php|tek 2008 conference.

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

The PHP London Conference for 2008 is behind us now and, from what the bloggers are saying, it went off wonderfully. Here's a bit from Mikko Koppanen:

To summarize it: I had fun. [...] I met quite a lot of new people at the conference and of course it was nice to see the familiar faces from other conferences and PHPLondon meetings. [...] A huge thanks to the organizers for making this day possible!

From Ivo Jansch:

I've attended the first PHPLondon conference 2 years ago, and it was great to see the progress that they made since then. The venue, the presentations, the catering, the organization, everything was improved significantly and contributed to a great conference.

And from Rob Allen:

The PHP UK Conference in London is over for another year and this year's event was another evolutionary improvement on last year's. [...] All in all it was a great conference and I'm looking forward to next year's.

David Goodwin has posted some of his own thoughts too.