Kevin Schroeder is looking for suggestions. He wants to know what the PHP community wants to hear about in upcoming webinars from Zend.

Just wrapped up a call working on our webinar schedule for the year. We've got a bunch of ideas but we'd like to also get your input as well. Yes, I know y'all want ZF2 webinars. We have that down. I would also like to do an HTML5 and mobile webinar but I need an SME (Subject Matter Expert) for that. [...] I would also love to have webinars on how to use various API's, even if there is not native PHP support. So, what kinds of webinars do you want?

Leave your suggestions in his comments along with one already suggesting a "Why PHP?" checklist of sorts to help encourage companies/employers to go with the language.

On the PHPClasses.org blog there's a new post with a "zeitgeist" they've generated from statistics on the site (such as search queries and overall popularity of packages).

For those that are not yet aware of this probably because they only arrived to the PHPClasses site recently, PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that aims to study what were the last year trends regarding what PHP developers have been searching for.

According to their results, some of the trends ramping up (or still going strong) for 2012 include:

• Social media sites
• Sites like Groupon, Foursquare and Bitcoin
• jQuery plugins
• Doctrine
• MODX
• SugarCRM

On 7php.com there's a new interview posted with Enrico Zimual of Zend - "Everything is an Array in PHP".

In this edition, I talked with Enrico Zimuel a computer geek since he was 9yrs old. He has written a couple of books namely "Secrets, Spies and Cipher Codes" published by Apogeo in 1999 and the recent "How to use the digital sign" published by Tecniche Nuove in 2010. Enrico has a pretty impressive 'geek' path. He also speaks at many international conferences [...]. You can find his presentations on slideshare.

Questions in the interview include:

• How do you find PHP now as compared to when you first started?
• Based on your experience, what are the good and bad parts of PHP?
• To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your advice?
• What are some good PHP blog or resources you highly recommend?

Read the full interview here.

In this most recent post to PHPMaster.com Alex Stetsenko takes a look at the Zend Job Queue functionality, a part of the Zend Server installation. He talks about some basic usage to make HTTP requests and a more extended example showing report generation.

Web applications usually follow a synchronous communication model. However, non-interactive and long-running tasks (such as report generation) are better suited for asynchronous execution. One way to off-load tasks to run at a later time, or even on a different server, is use the Job Queue module available as a part of Zend Server 5 (though not as part of the Community Edition). Job Queue allows job scheduling based on time, priority, and even dependencies

In his two examples, he shows the code involved to create a new Queue object and define a HttpJob in it. The first just calls a "sample.php" script that's exposed as a part of your external-facing site and shows how you can get the current status of the job. The more advanced example shows a call to a "report.php" script with a set of options defining things like "type", "length" and "priority". He also points out some other options that can do similar things like Gearman, NodeJs and RabbitMQ.

In this new press release Zend has announced the posting of the results from their "Zend Developer Pluse" survey - a survey taken of developers world-wide about their habits, preferences and desires.

Zend Technologies addresses [the question of how a new demand for a new generation of apps] in Zend Developer Pulse, a new survey series that takes the pulse of a vibrant community of developers from around the world. The company's first developer survey conducted in late November 2011 offers insights on emerging technology and career trends captured from 3,335 respondents. The findings are summarized in a report now available at [http://www.zend.com/topics/zend-developer-pulse-survey-report-0112-EN.pdf].

The press release mentions some of the details from the survey including that 66% of developers will be working with mobile app development projcts, that next-generation UI deveopment scored high in skillsets, there was a strong interest in cloud development and that there's been a strong rise in the need for PHP development skills in the last year.

You can read the entire report here.

Kevin Schroeder has come back around and has posted a new tutorial to his blog showing how to connect PDT to the Zend Developer Cloud (the "PHP Development Tools" extension for the Eclipse IDE).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of blog posts on how to connect to the Zend Developer cloud with various IDEs. Except one that I missed... PDT. The deployment plugin is already installed in PDT 3 and so you already will have the ability to push to the DevCloud instance.

The process is pretty simple thanks to that plugin - just create the project (or use an existing one), set up a new target for deployment then launch and deploy the PHP application directly. You can find out more about the "PHP Development Tools" on its Eclipse project site.

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a recording of an interview with Boaz Ziniman of Zend about one of their latest offerings, phpcloud - a platform-as-a-service to provide easy, scalable PHP application hosting.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it's different than most of the other options out there.

If you'd like to listen, you can grab the mp3 here. It's about 15 minutes long. You can find out more about Zend's cloud offering on phpcloud.com.

Kevin Schroeder has a method in one of his latest posts for hooking your linux-based system into Zend's phpcloud platform, complete with an automatic upload (so you're not constantly sftp-ing).

Connecting with the Zend DevCloud in Linux is actually quite easy if you know how to use SFTP. [...] But, as I said in a previous post, I hate having to do command line stuff for each and every file or commit. I like things to work seamlessly. So what I did was write a PHP script that connects to the DevCloud (or any SSH-based endpoint for that matter) and then monitors all of the files and directories for changes, such as a creation, modification or deletion event.

His script (available on github) uses the PECL inotify package to work, but once its set up, you can have the PHP process running the script in the background, pointed at your web root, and have it upload automatically.

Kevin Schroeder has a new post for the Netbeans users out there wanting to work with the Zend Developer Cloud directly without having to mess around with other external software.

Getting NetBeans connected to the Zend Developer Cloud is actually pretty simple… if you have NetBeans 7.1 which is currently in RC. NetBeans 7.0 has a bug that won't allow you to connect to Git over HTTPS. NetBeans 7.1 fixes that issue. You will also need to make sure that you have the Git module installed.

His post includes the step by step process (including some screenshots to getting the automated deployment set up and working in this popular IDE. The key is setting up the SFTP connection to point to the right location on the cloud server (the path isn't very intuitive, he recommends finding it with another SFTP program for the initial setup).

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial that shares a few regular expression tips about doing some search and replace in your content.

So how can you practice using regex if you are limited to just using them in your code? The answer is to use a utility, of which there are many, that uses regex for performing search and replace. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the standard "find x and replace it with y" type of search and replace. Most IDEs and text editors have built in regex engines to handle search and replace. In this article I'd like to walk through a series of exercises to help you practice using regex.

His examples are based on Netbeans but can be used in just about any IDE that supports regex (or even just your code). He shows how to match word boundaries, do some grouping, work with back references and doing some search/replace based on multiple groupings.