Splebly

Although less mature than OSCommerce and Zen Cart, I think Magento's more up-to-date architecture and sizable, growing community make it a good choice for someone starting out with e-commerce today. Have you looked into e-commerce …

Matt Collin…

New from the Web Developer’s Virtual Library today is this overview by Marc Plotz of the Zend Framework, including a brief introduction to the Model/View/Controller design pattern.

Many developers are scared off by the thought of something as huge and confusing as the Zend Framework – I know this because I was once one of them. What I soon learned was that there is some pleasure in working with a framework that does most of the nauseating grind work for you. However, there is a trade off: you have to understand the somewhat pedantic nature of the code required along with the principles of the design pattern that is MVC (Model-View-Controller). Is it worth it? Let’s take a look.

The article takes a very high level look at the framework mentioning the bootstrapping the framework does (“not only safe, it makes sense”) and a look at one of the many components the framework comes with – Zend_Mail.

On the W3Avenue site today there’s a list of tools posted that could come in quite handy in your PHP development:

Whether you are a PHP novice or an experienced developer; tools that you use have direct impact on your productivity. W3Avenue has compiled a list of really useful extensions & tools for PHP developers that will help you speed up development and significantly improve overall quality of your code.

They’ve broken them out into a few different categories – accelerators, build systems, tools applying to code enhancement and correctness, database connectivity, debugging, development/IDEs, security, setup and testing. They also throw in links to a few cheat sheets you can use for quick reference.

suyhnc via creactility)