So we didn’t take top honors last night, but being up against some awesome competitors, we held our own with a shared Productivity Award for Zend Framework in the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category and had a lot of fun at the awards presentation.

In addition to that, Wil & I will be presenting at the San Francisco PHP Meetup group, a recently rejuvenated user group in the Bay Area here that has close to a hundred participants attending every month for the past couple of months in the vibrant South of Market (SoMa) area of the City. If you’re nearby or in town the first Thursday of any month, be sure to drop by. Michael Tougeron has been doing an excellent job hosting this at his employer’s venue, CNET (Thanks CNET!), which has a nice big room, some snacks to chow on, and double screens overhead for easy viewing of PHP scripts and anything else we want to discuss.

This month Wil & I present–according to Cal at Zend DevZone, some wacky antics–around the new 1.5 release of Zend Framework. Hope to see you there!

Congratulations are due to the entire Zend Framework community and especially to all contributors to the project. We’ve been selected as finalists for a Jolt Award in the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category, standing among five other excellent contenders.

Zend Framework 1.0.3 was selected as a finalist for the 2007 Jolt Awards, to be awarded at Software Development West in March 2008.

Great job! (Congrats to Cal Evans and the Zend DevZone team who are also finalists for web sites/developer networks.)

The finalists for the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category, along with their sponsoring organizations, are:

Eclipse Modeling Project
Eclipse

Guice
Google Inc

JasperReports
JasperSoft

Qt Jambi
Trolltech

Spring Framework
SpringSource

Zend Framework
Zend Technologies

Great job, everyone!

Zend Framework 1.0 launched at the beginning of July and since then we’ve had two mini-releases (1.01 & 1.02), with 1.03 coming up in a week or so. Congratulations are due to the entire Zend Framework community who has risen to the challenge of embracing, promoting, and most importantly, using Zend Framework for getting real work done.

Though I may be the one with evangelist listed on my business card here at Zend, the entire Zend team works hard to be evangelists and spread the word on ZF and it’s a job requirement that we’re all involved with the community: speaking, meeting, and yes, emailing many of you helping to make ZF so great.

When Mark de Visser (my boss) last posted on Zend Framework, we had over 1 million clicks on our download link & SVN server and it looked likely that we would have 2 million by year-end. Since then, the enthusiasm and interest in ZF has grown beyond what the community and ZF core team at Zend could have hoped for. We are now well over 2.7 million downloads and are on track for more than 3 million by year end! Safe to say that hundreds of thousands of PHP programmers worldwide (more…)