Fans of the Solar PHP framework will be happy to know that Paul Jones, a lead developer on the project, has gotten approval to spend forty percent of his (day job) time on the project!

My employer, OmniTI, is allowing me to spend a minimum of 40% of my paid work time on the Solar Framework for PHP 5 (plus additional time as duty allows). The project remains open-source under New BSD license.

The Solar framework is a PHP 5 framework for web application development. It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels.

Company	OmniTI
Location	Brooklyn, NY
Title	PHP Talent
Summary	OmniTI is looking for PHP developers to join our new office in Brooklyn. Located in DUMBO (home of world-famous Grimaldi's Pizzeria), OmniTI's NY office is located in the heart of a vibrant neighborhood, and this is just one of the many perks you can enjoy as part of our team. Other benefits include 3 weeks of vacation (for starters), a generous conference allowance, and of course the chance to work with many of the thought leaders in the PHP community. Among our staff, we have authored 8 books, given hundreds of conference presentations, and have a higher density of open source contributors than almost any company in the world. We love what we do. We love where we work. We want you to love it, too. If you'd like to drop by for a visit and discuss our open positions, please contact Chris Shiflett.
Link	More Information

Many congratulations go out to OmniTI on the celebration of their tenth birthday. As Chris Shiflett puts it:

Earlier this month (on the 4th, to be exact), OmniTI celebrated its 10th birthday. From humble beginnings in Theo's basement to a company of almost 50 employees, things have certainly changed.

Theo Schlossnagle also has his own post about the occasion, remembering the company's origins and what it has become:

On September 4th 1997, Sherry (my mother) and I incorporated OmniTI, Inc. and started doing business. So, naturally, on September 4th this year, clan OmniTI went to a local bar and celebrated being in business for ten years. I didn't prepare a speech, I didn't give a pep-talk; instead, I decided that day was for me. I sat back and looked on with tremendous pride at OmniTI. What is OmniTI? OmniTI is its people and their sacrifices.

OmniTI employs several web known PHPers including Chris Shiflett, Laura Thomson and Wez Furlong.

As mentioned in a new post on the Zend Developer Zone today, a new feature to the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this year will be the option for participants to enjoy the unconference atmosphere. To make sure things are running smoothly with these talks, they've appointed Patrick Reilly to try to keep things in line.

This year we are trying something new at ZendCon, we are providing Unconference space for attendees to create their own sessions. To help facilitate this, we have asked someone to be the Unconference Chairperson. This person won't be in charge of setting the agenda or approving sessions, the attendees will do that. This person will be the coordinator, the facilitator, the person in charge.

Cal did a short interview with Patrick about the role he'll be playing and his own message to those attendees that might want to participate.

Edin Kadribasic shares some great news on his blog this morning those using the PHP Windows builds will be happy to hear.

During my time at Emini I was using an old beat up machine to build PHP snapshots for Windows. It was only a Pentium II 400MHz and compiling a PHP snapshot on that machine took more than an hour. After leaving Emini I needed to find a new box for compiling PHP snapshots and PECL extensions for the Windows platform.

The light at the end of the tunnel came when Wez Furlong reminded him about a box OmniTI had that could handle just that. Now, what used to take over an hour to run takes around six minutes (a full compile of the latest snapshot with all of the extensions, including checkout and upload of the Win32 snapshot).

As Laura Thomson points out, OmniTI, employer of several active participants in the PHP community, has launched their labs.omniti.com website:

OmniTI Labs is our repository for some of the projects we generate while working on stuff for clients, for our products, or just on things that we think are cool. The website is a way for us to give this code back to the community.

Right now, the repository includes three projects:

• Alexandria - a PHP library of related bits and pieces they use in their projects
• Spreadlogd - a simple tool to log messages received via the Spread Group Communication system (in conjunction with mod_log_spread)
• ZetaBck - a "thin-agent based ZFS backup tool"

Keep checking back for more projects and helpful libraries in the future.

Many congratulations to Laura Thomson of OmniTI for her promotion to principal responsible for the "Customer Engagement Experience".

From the official press release:

As principal, Thomson is responsible for ensuring that OmniTI builds and delivers the most appropriate web-based solutions to meet the specific requirements of each client. Thomson's new role has expanded to include guaranteeing optimal quality during every OmniTI customer engagement. This includes ensuring that all client solutions are scalable, highly secure and able to perform on a level that exceeds customer expectations. She is also responsible for growing OmniTI's web development and client services teams as well as internal training.

Laura has authored the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (best seller) and co-authored the book "MySQL Tutorial". For more information about OmnitTI and the services they (and Laura bring to the table, check out their website.

Many congratulations go out to Laura Thomson for her promotion over at OmniTI (a company that employs several of the prominent members of the PHP community, including Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, and Theo Schlossnagle).

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to the position of Principal. " My role will include focusing on securing new business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service delivery.

Congratulations, Laura! Best of luck in this new position!

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has another of his interviews with the speakers at various PHP conferences, this time, it's with Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTi.

This is another in a series of interviews I've been conducting as I travel to different conferences. Most of the people I get the chance to interview are directly involved with PHP in some way. This interview is a bit different. Theo Schlossnagle is the founder of OmniTI, one of the premier PHP consulting companies in the world. OmniTI consults with companies all around the globe on issues ranging from architecture to security.

Cal asks questions about the background of OmniTI, how they find/retain programmers, Messaging Systems, Theo's book, scaling in general, and some of his thoughts on what PHP still has to overcome.

Wez Furlong has posted information about even more positions opening at OmniTI (check out this post for information on the others).

In addition to the PHP web dev openings that Laura mentioned, we're also looking to hire some mid-level systems engineers to code primarily in C on UNIX/Windows.

If you're interested in working directly with George, Theo and myself (and the veritable host of other smart, interesting and fun people that also work at OmniTI) on some of the fastest, most highly stressed core infrastructure applications ever created, then we'd like to hear from you.

For complete details on the position(s), check out the full description over on the OmniTI website.