The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of a new book from Packt Publishing that introduces you to the Joomla! content management system and how to create your own bits of functionality for it - Mastering Joomla! 1.5 - Extension and Framework Development.

Planning to write a few extensions for site's I host I was looking for a book that could at least in part be a replacement for this documentation. As I went through the site of Pact publishing My eye fell on this particular book because of the example chapter they show. And indeed now I have the book I'm in no way disappointed.

He mentions the target audience of the book (and how well it hits it), the approach the book takes to the topics it covers and specific looks at several of the chapter topics like web services, error handling, security and plug-in structure.

On the PHPClasses.org blog, there's an article from Manuel Lemos that gives ten tips trying to help you get a better PHP job (they're all the way at the bottom, just scroll down).

The list of tips include things like:

• Qualify yourself to stand out from the crowd
• Get more exposure to yourself in the PHP community
• Do well on job interviews
• Evolve in your career making your employer profit more

Check out the post for more great tips.

• Phonetic
• TPLManager
• Export To Excel
• DHTML and CSS CAPTCHA
• Print Anything
• Pretty Latin
• A New PHP Form validation
• GV Pagination Class
• Event Logger
• Universal Feed Generator
• DbGraph
• Persistent Array
• Button Panel

• PHP Tip Class
• Cache library
• GV RecordSet Class
• Backup database structure
• RSS_PHP
• packagex
• ExifSort
• Phonetic
• TPLManager

• Simple ORM database mapping for PHP
• DG
• Calendar Frame
• ods-php
• libMail2008
• phpBB3 poster
• GV Conection Class
• DBSql Class
• GV Connection Class
• Ultimate Mysql table to Object wrapper
• Calc Hondt
• SMTP Client
• CSV Importer

The PHPClasses.org site has announced the winner of their "PHP Programming Award 2007" - Cesar Rodas:

Since the beginning of February, the ranking of PHP Programming Award winners of 2007 is available As you may see Cesar Rodas is top ranked of all authors that were nominated to the award during 2007.

His prize was a stuffed PHP friend of his very own - an elePHPant (as created by Vincent Pointier and Damien Seguy). There's also an interview with Cesar included.

• Google Query
• Database Table
• Pictoru's BNR Parser
• SPLObjects
• Page Numbers
• WG DB Class
• Simple Database Class
• Data grid Component
• Akismet class
• MySQL
• Kenny Translator
• formAt
• Simple ORM database mapping for PHP
• DG

• Multi-Dimensional Array Handler
• MySQL2JSON
• BBCode Parser
• sphpcompiler
• Processing
• Exponsor Mod
• SimplePaging
• web20vnRouter
• SStatus
• Magic Array
• sqlExec
• myAltCaptcha
• Dynamic Method
• preg_magic

• JPEG Slicer
• class upload file
• Feed Generator
• CSV Creation
• KG MySQL Class
• MYDB Class
• myYouYube
• Cotação do Dollar
• Object dynamic generation
• HTTP client class
• convert

• jQuery-PHP
• File Host Link Tester
• Nearest weekday
• My Ajax
• PHP Session
• HTML Compactor
• twitterlibphp
• Shopping Basket
• QTxtDB
• RegEXml