Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted about the next step in his personal growth on the internet - a personal site/blog of his own over at andigutmans.com.

For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.

He lists the technologies he's using including the Zend Framework, the Zend_Gdata component and the Zend_Cache (for local caching of his blog feeds from Blogger).

PHPClasses.org has posted a review of a new PHP-related book from Packt Publishing, "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5":

This book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5. It was written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. It is intended for Web developers, designers, Web masters, content editors and marketing professionals. It is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla! 1.5, and for those who just want have a good printed manual at hand.

R.L. (the reviewer) goes through some of the chapters, detailing their content including some of the software mentioned in them (like Fireboard and DOCman). He recommends the book to anyone looking for a good in-hand Joomla! resource but notes that a chapter on security would have been a nice addition.

For those that might be wondering why some of their favorite blogs look a little different today - today is the official CSS Naked Day and some of the PHPers from around the community are getting involved too:

• Chris Shiflett
• Elizabeth Smith
• Lorna Mitchell
• Jon Gibbins
• Ben Ramsey
• Travis Swicegood

Check back as the day progresses for more sites added to the list! Are you participating? Let us know and we'll add you to the list!

A little bit back Akash Mehta posted a list of seven sites he thought could make you a better PHP programmer for reading and keeping track of:

Developing in PHP isn't a textbook science. There's skill to it, and that skill comes from experience. Now, you could try your hand at every single PHP development challenge out there, or you could learn from the experiences of others, widely published on the web in blogs and developer portals.

Included in the list are sites like php|architect's C7Y site, Planet PHP and the the Zend Developer Zone (oh yeah, PHPDeveloper.org made the list too!)

As you may (or may not, if you're a feed reader) have noticed, a few things have just changed around here. PHPDeveloper.org has made the move away from the Zend Framework over to the Solar Framework, and to answer the question of why - really it was just to try something new. We'd been using the Zend Framework since around back when it first hit the scene and felt like it was time for a change.

Paul Jones, Rodrigo Moraes, Antti Holvikari and the crew have done a fine job in producing a framework that's not only easy to use but makes building powerful web applications nice and easy. You can check out more about the framework on its site, SolarPHP.com.

That said, I'm sure there'll be a few growing pains as this new version of the site gets settled in, so bear with us. If you happen to spot something that might be an issue or just an opinion you want to share, drop us a line at info@phpdeveloper.org to let us know.

Sebastian Bergmann has officially announced the creation of a new planet in the PHP community - one specifically for the PHPUnit testing suite - Planet PHPUnit.

At the moment only three feeds are aggregated on Planet PHPUnit: release announcements, articles about new features in PHPUnit written by myself, and Manuel Pichler's blog postings on phpUnderControl.

He also is requesting that anyone out there currently writing on any topics surrounding the popular unit testing framework send him an email letting him know where it's at.

Hasin Hayder has started up a new project that he's documented in a new blog entry - the creation of a new jobs website in PHP.

I was involved in making a job site few days ago. During the development, I have studied how easily anyone can develop a job site using PHP (language independent in true sense) . So I decide to write a blog post about my experience and here it goes. But note that this article is not about scaling or balancing the load on your site during heavy traffic, heh heh.

He comments on the startup process surrounding this type of site and makes suggestions about something to consider for your careers site - pulling job content from other sites in two ways - screen scraping and using the job search APIs out there.

Leon Chevalier has posted about a class he's developed (you can download it here) that can help to speed up the load times for your site.

There are 4 relatively easy ways by which you can speed up the time it takes a browser to download a page. Following on from my post on joining CSS and JavaScript files, I have written a PHP script which will automatically do all of the above.

He gives example code of the class in action and includes some screenshots of the benchmarks from the YSlow Firefox extension showing the improvements.