On his blog today, Vinu Thomas spotlights one of the major up and comers in the PHP-based eCommerce software package offerings - Magento.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

This new post on the ThinkPHP blog (from Sarah Hermann) talks about some of her first experiences with the popular IDE from Zend, Zend Studio for Eclipse:

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.