Time are getting tough out there - a recession is coming around and companies all over are feeling the impact. People are looking for places to save money without having to compromise on functionality and quality. Larger numbers are turning to Open Source communities to provide solutions to fill that gap. Stefan Koopmanschap looks at this trend in his most recent blog post.

As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?

Stefan talks about Enterprise resources and their shift in needs away from the "vanity projects" and more into the day-to-day, stable clients. Open Source is giving them a bit of that "fun" back in and allowing them to do more with less - little to no licensing, no vendor lockdown, etc.

A little while back on his PHP Kitchen blog Demian Turner asked the question, "Is vendor sponsored software certification the way to go?". An easy example? The Zend Certified Engineer tests.

Currently Zend certification is one of the only options available to PHP devs who want to get accredited, however. But judging by general feedback from the community it would appear that, despite the current certification choices, quality discrepancies between PHP devs on the market can still be pretty...impressive.

He points to another post from Darren Hague (on Derren's SAP blog) that has three elements that any good certification needs to really be considered successful:

• Quality - it must be professional and independent
• Portability - it must be independent of the company you work for at the time
• Customer Demand - without demand for certified people in that area, there's no reason to have the certification

Be sure and check out some of the comments to Demian's post form some other opinions.

Paul Jones has a quick note on his blog today mentioning the updates recently made to the "Getting Started" documentation for the Solar PHP framework. There's five new sections as a result of the overhaul:

• A howto on download and installation
• Creating a workspace
• Making an application inside it
• Working with your first model
• Combining the model and app.

You can find out more about this PHP MVC framework on its site - SolarPHP.com.

On the SaniSoft blog today, Tarique Sani has a quick hack for CakePHP users needing to transition over from the deprecated vendor() call - import().

Use of vendor() function to load third party libs in CakePHP has been deprecated for some time now... It has been replaced with the more generic App::import() the usage is simple.

There's also a little trick you'll need to know for files with underscores (drop it and replace with an uppercase) and how to get it to be a bit more flexible and recognize vendor files in subdirectories or ones differently named.

Felix Geisendorfer has a new post today showing off an example of his screencasting abilities. Specifically, the video looks at using vendor branching to keep your CakePHP installation up to date.

So here I go with my very first screencast to be published. The topic is how to use vendor branching with CakePHP which is one of many ways to keep your CakePHP version up to date.

The video is 15(ish) minutes long and covers, from start to finish, the process of grabbing the latest CakePHP build from the subversion repository and install it automatically to your system.

As a plus, Felix also includes links to the software he used to make the screencast for those that are curious.

According to a new press release today, Turbolinux has announced their partnership with Zend Japan, Ltd. to further "Internet Linux Deployment in the Asian markets" (through the purchase of a 90% share of their stock).

Under the terms of the contract negotiations concluded on March 30, Turbolinux acquired a ninety percent share (1,170 shares) of Zend Japan Ltd. from Open Source Japan, Ltd. Zend Japan will continue to serve as the exclusive distributor of Zend web application platform products in Japan.

"With Turbolinux, Zend Japan will closely plan and promote Turbolinux and Zend/PHP products and solutions and will be able to provide them in a comprehensive and stable format. In this dynamic alliance with Turbolinux and Zend Technologies, Zend Japan will offer products and service which cover the needs of Japanese market," added Mr. Suzuki.

Turbolinux will be using their sales and distribution channels to help further the reach of theirs and Zend's technologies. The negotiations for the whole deal were completed back on March 30th, but nothing was revealed until April 5th.