It’s idea is to be a community website for PHP programmers from Serbia and other countries from the region. The idea for this website “hit” me somewhere in April or May I think, while I was lurking the interwebs for some, any PHP communities in the region, user groups, anything really, where local PHP programmers could share ideas, news, interests, etc., but found nothing (well, besides 2 bulletin boards and a few of us on Twitter). So, I decided to try and create one.

Of course, this website is only the first step. The purpose of this website is to share news, articles and whatnot with other programmers, something like Mr. Cornutt does on phpdeveloper.org ;) There’s not much up there yet, but that’ll change soon :) Altho the functionality of the website is pretty simple and I could’ve put it out in like 2 hours with wordpress, I wrote it from scratch (using Zend Framework of course!), just, well, because I can :D Once I tidy up the code and maybe refactor here and there, it’ll be up on github (multiple reasons for putting it up there, but that’s for some other post).

I have other ideas for the future, both online and offline related, but first want to put this website on it’s feet.

So, here’s to a better and brighter future for PHP communities around here!

Happy hacking!

You can find my posterous account at http://robertbasic.posterous.com/.

That is all.

The main purpose of this blog is to educate users about open source software and to show alternatives to proprietary software.

The original idea was a blog only in Serbian, but we got this awesome domain, so it ended up as a multi-language blog. The English version is on tryopensource.info and the Serbian is on sr.tryopensource.info.

Be sure to grab the feed and read our first article, an interview with Robert Castley, the man behind JotBug :)

Cheers!

Update #1 (seconds after publishing): Gotta love Twitter. Already got a message that I missed a blog. List is updated.

Update #2: Added more blogs to the list, thanks Jani for the recommendations!

Update #3: Thanks to Federico and Pablo, even more stuff to add :)

Update #4: Thank you Jon and Cal :)

Update #5: This is growing up into a pretty big list :) new stuff added!

Update #6: Should I keep adding these Update #x lines? :)

Update #7: A bunch of new stuff!

Update #8: A new ZF application via Federico’s blog!

Blogs

Blogs are probably the most important resources out there. Besides the posts, comments can add a great value to the topic, so be sure to read them too. Here are the blogs that have posts on ZF and were updated recently (in the past month or two):

• Matthew Weier O’Phinney — Phly, boy, phly
• Pádraic Brady — Maugrim The Reaper’s Blog
• Rob Allen — Akra’s Dev Notes
• Jani Hartikainen — CodeUtopia
• Michelangelo van Dam — DragonBe’s PHP blog
• A.J. Brown — A.J. Brown’s Blog
• Federico Cargnelutti — PHP::Impact ([str Blog])
• Matthew Turland — Matthew Turland
• Juozas Kaziukėnas — Juozas devBlog
• Bradley Holt — Bradley Holt’s Blog
• Jon Lebensold — ZendCasts
• Tom Graham — Tom Graham’s Blog
• Benjamin Eberlei — Benjamin Eberlei’s Blog
• Thomas Weidner — Blacksheeps paradise
• Mike Rötgers — Mike Rötgers’ Blog
• Raphael Stolt — Raphael on PHP
• Armando Padilla — Online Notes
• FrontRangePHP users group
• Tobis blog — in German
• Ralfs Zend Framework und PHP Blog — in German
• ZFBlog.de — in German
• Alexander Romanenko — Alex Tech Adventures

Also, I recommend subscribing to PHPDeveloper’s and Zend Developer Zone’s feeds, just in case I missed some good blogs ;)

Twitter

On Twitter there are many friendly developers willing to help out with any problems related to Zend Framework — just write your question with a ZF hashtag and someone will most likely show up with the answer :)

• Wil Sinclair
• Matthew Weier O’Phinney
• Rob Allen
• Pádraic Brady
• Jani Hartikainen
• Matthew Turland
• Bradley Holt
• Michelangelo van Dam
• arjo
• Barry Roodt
• Milan Momčilović
• Saša Tomislav Mataić
• Shawn Stratton
• Mario Volke
• Brian DeShong
• Casey Wilson
• Ralph Schindler
• Tom Holder
• Willie Alberty
• Davey Shafik
• Jacob Kiers
• Cal Evans
• Federico Cargnelutti
• ZendCasts
• Robert Castley
• Jason Gilmore
• Alexander Romanenko

Books

These two books are a must read. That is all :)

Surviving The Deep End — a free online book that is written chapter by chapter. Author is Pádraic Brady:

The book was written to guide readers through the metaphorical “Deep End”. It’s the place you find yourself in when you complete a few tutorials and scan through the Reference Guide, where you are buried in knowledge up to your neck but without a clue about how to bind it all together effectively into an application. This take on the Zend Framework offers a survival guide, boosting your understanding of the framework and how it all fits together by following the development of a single application from start to finish. I’ll even throw in a few bad jokes for free.

Zend Framework in Action — OK, this book is not an online resource, but it is great and surely must be mentioned :) Authors are Rob Allen, Nick Lo and Steven Brown:

Zend Framework in Action is a book that covers all you need to know to get started with the Zend Framework.
The first part of the book works through the creation of web site using the MVC components (Zend_Controller, Zend_View and Zend_Db). The book then follows on by looking at user authentication and access control, forms, searching and email to round out the application. After considering deployment issues, we then look at other components that add value to a web site; including web services, PDF creation, internationalisation and caching.

Guide to Programming with Zend Framework — another great book, a must have. Written by Cal Evans.

This book covers much of the primary functionality offered by the Zend Framework, and works well both as a thorough introduction to its use and as a reference for higher-level tasks

Beginning Zend Framework — written by Armando Padilla

Beginning Zend Framework is a beginner’s guide to learning and using the Zend Framework. It covers everything from the installation to the various features of the framework to get the reader up and running quickly.

Easy PHP Websites with Zend Framework by Jason Gilmore

Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework is the ultimate guide to building powerful PHP websites. Combining over 330 pages of instruction with almost 5 hours of online video and all of the example code, you’ll have everything you need to learn PHP faster and more effectively than you ever imagined.

Applications powered by ZF

Wanna see what’s ZF capable of?

• A web-based Project Management & Issue/Bug Tracking solution — JotBug
• A content management system — Digitalus CMS
• A project management system — PHPProjekt 6
• eCommerce platform — Magento
• PHP Lifestream Aggregator, by Johan Nilssons — a phplifestream example and it’s source
• A free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform — Omeka

Other resources

Of course, there’s the good ol’ IRC, channels are #zftalk and #zftalk.dev. For more information, visit ZFTalk.

Jani Hartikainen’s Packageizer is a great tool to get only those ZF components you need.

Scienta ZF Debug Bar an awesome plugin for Zend Framework which “injects into every request a snippet of HTML with commonly used debug information.”

There’s also the Zend Framework Forum. For those of you who understand it, here’s a German forum www.zfforum.de.

The Zend Framework Wiki and the Zend Framework Issue Tracker are also very helpful, so, be sure to check them out.

The unofficial PEAR channel for the Zend Framework can be found at http://zend.googlecode.com/.

That’s all from me. This are the resources I found useful and hopefully are and will be useful for you too :)

Do you know anything I missed? If so, please, leave a comment and I’ll update the post :)

Cheers!

Full Circle is a free, independent, magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories.

The current issue is #21. All issues are available on the download page.

The current issue is a 45 page PDF; it contains news, tips on using the console, different how-tos, game reviews, interviews, etc.

Enjoy the reading, cheers!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my console is waiting! Happy hacking!

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in support of the Year of Human Rights as called for by the U.N., “One Day for Human Rights” is a project aimed to promote and support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by getting the Governments to print this document in our passports.

Human rights is a subject that is rarely spoken of, at least, around here. It needs more attention. And even more than that. So spread the word and be sure to participate on December 10, 2008 in a blog, podcast and/or videocast action:

December 10, 2008 is a very special day because this year marks the 60th the Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On this day bloggers, podcasters and videocasters from all over the world will take action and voice their opinions on anything and everything related to Human Rights.

Here’s a starting point: Ideas for blog posts, podcasts, videocasts

And here are some badges to put on your site, blog, whatever to make it stand out. Cause it needs to stand out. Get Your “One Day for Human Rights” Badge!

And be sure to follow @HumanRightsDay on Twitter.

Cheers!

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

I was long looking for this kind of place, to get my brain do some serious thinking :) It’s a great way to improve logic and math/programming skills.

The problems can be solved by using any programming language, so as I just started learning Python, thought that this is a great way to start with it. As I suck more in math than in programming, my solutions are brute-forced, but I always go back to the explanation of the problem (can be viewed only after you gave the right answer to the problem), to understand the math behind the problem.

There are currently 214 problems and I’m on number 6 right now. If you into this kind of stuff, be sure to check it out, it’s a lot of fun :)

Happy hacking!

Cheers!

The result of smushing

There are several ways to provide images to SmushIt:

• Upload an image
• Provide an URL to the image
• Use the Firefox SmushIt add-on

The first two ways are quite obvious; provide an image and it’ll process it in a few seconds.

The Firefox add-on is pretty cool: open up a web page where are the images you want to smush, click the SmushIt add-on icon (it’ll be in the right corner of the status bar), it will take you to their site and process all the images found on your web page.

When the processing is complete, there will be a table showing details about the smushing. Also a download link will be provided, to download the smushed images in one zip file.

Now run little lurker and smush your images :)