WHAT WE DO:
Very simply put- Red Ventures acquires customers for Great Brands through a myriad of direct marketing channels. We combine analytical marketers, high performing and often unique direct response marketing channels, a superior web and sales infrastructure, with a robust technology and reporting platform. We partner with industry leading brands such as DIRECTV, SIRIUS Satellite Radio, and ADT Home Security Systems. Red Ventures success has recently been recognized by Inc Magazine with the #4 ranking on their Fastest Growing Private Companies in the US list and by DIRECTV as their Dealer of the Year!

WHY SHOULD YOU WANT TO WORK HERE?
Red Ventures' company culture is what gives us our competitive advantage and what attracts top talent from all over the nation. We give our employees the freedom to drive their career direction and to create their own growth opportunities. There is an amazing energy and determination to our team but it comes in a casual office environment with no bureaucracy and no dress code. To be a real player in our company you must be passionate about your work and we expect that passion to run over into the rest of your life. Red Ventures requires that our employees have a healthy work life balance where fun and excitement are a common theme.

We offer unique benefits to our employees such as company sponsored Happy Hours, Cook Outs on our back patio and quick games of 3 on 3 on the basketball court. Tired of paying for parking? We have free parking and our office is conveniently surrounded by restaurants, shops, a fitness facility, and a daycare center. While we are very proud of our current benefits, we look internally for suggestions on ways to continually improve our benefits! We offer a top-notch work environment for our developers, that includes Eclipse with SVN using two development machines and three monitors!

SR. SYSTEMS ANALYST/WEB DEVELOPER POSITION:
Due to our growth we are seeking a Sr. Systems Analyst/Web Developer to be in a lead technical role on one of our businesses. This position requires the developer to have the business savvy to translate vague business requirements into tangible and accurate technical requirements as well as to anticipate future requirements within the design of new systems. This person should have experience in real-world LAMP (Linux/FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) development as well as a proven record participating and working with the business side of a company. This person must be well-experienced in large scale complex database design, query creation, and data integrity checking, processing, and reporting.

The primary job responsibility for this position is to provide PHP programming and functionality for a wide variety of consumer-related websites, intranets, extranets and web-based applications. This entails designing, evaluating, updating and maintaining OO and non-OO applications in PHP with a heavy emphasis on database design and reporting. This is the perfect opportunity for LAMP Developers looking to play a key role in creating enabling technology for a successful online and offline marketing company. This position will have a large development component based on the business requirements produced during business strategy sessions and day to day business requirements and changes.

Successful candidates will have demonstrable experience building real online applications in a LAMP environment and will be able to make a meaningful contribution from day one. They will be comfortable working with team members at all levels and departments within the organization. These individuals will be willing to share their opinions and insights with business leaders on a daily basis in order to affect rapid decision cycles and effective technical solutions to business requirements.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Sciences or similar field
• 6+ years of solid PHP and MySQL development
• Strong working knowledge of HTML, DHTML/CSS and Javascript
• Ability to translate business requirements into system design
• Ability to partner and work in a fast-paced, collaborative team environment
• Strong debugging skills and the ability to easily and quickly read and
• modify existing code
• Sense of humor
• Desire to roll up your sleeves and dig into the work!

• don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT
• have never used some form of version control like Subclipse
• don't use a consistent methodology
• don't use test-driven development
• don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes
• return HTML, not data, strings, or objects.
• don't allow intelligent error handling
• you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP

Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.

• this one from blueshoes.org
• a sheet covering filtering and escaping
• a Smarty cheat sheet
• a few covering WordPress
• and ones covering CakePHP and Drupal

Check out his page for more (and thumbnails for each).

Welcome to the new community site. We've still got a bit of finishing work to do, but I think everyone would agree that this is much better than the old site! Let us know what you think.

Rather than having their community efforts spread out over their current site, they decided on on centralized resource where people can get the latest news, check out the latest podcast and interact with fellow PHPers out there on the web.

Be sure to check it out for yourself and let them know what you think.

Congratulations are in order. Since the launch of GoPHP5.org, over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts have come on board to support the adoption of PHP 5.2. As opposed to just a few months ago, it is now easy to find a hosting solution that supports PHP 5, and software developers can turn to the attractive new features that PHP 5 offers without the need to worry that they are leaving their end users without options.

He gives credits to Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle for their hard work towards making the project a success and notes that the project can stand as a successful effort that the community pulled together on to make development and the platforms we build on that much better. Be sure and check out the long list of projects and hosting companies that made the move to PHP5.

Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.

On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").

You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

I've not added any new features to the class; I've simply updated it to be, well, better. Plus it uses PHP5's object model better. It's really just an update, ie if you're using the old version and it works, then you have no real reason to update it.

You can check out the source here and an example of it in action here.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.

I've proposed Zend_Microformat on the ZF Proposal Wiki at Zend_Microformat - Padraic Brady. I've also started a proposal page for Zend_Microformat_Xfn.

He briefly explains what they are ("a collection of data encodings") and an example of their use (like the XHTML Friends Network to link social network users). You can find out more about them here.