Updates to Zend DevZone
If you are reading this article on the website, then you have hopefully already noticed a number of visual tweaks that have been just released. However there are a few new pieces of functionality that I wanted to point out:
h3. Gravatars
DevZone now supports Gravatars for linking in pictures of any author or commenter. To find your gravatar, it looks at the email account associated with your zend.com account. So if you don’t have a gravatar showing up, then you need to either register a Gravatar at “http://gravatar.com/”:http://gravatar.com/ or go edit your Zend.com account to point to an up to date email address for you.
h3. OpenSearch
We now announce our search engine via the “OpenSearch Format”:http://www.opensearch.org/. What this means, is that in any web browser that supports the protocol (such as FireFox), you will be able to add Zend DevZone as search engine choice for your browser’s search box. For example, in FireFox, while browsing this website, you should see the arrow next to the Search Engine dropdown start to glow. Clicking on that brings up the list of engines you wish to use, at the bottom it will say: “Add Zend DevZone” Choosing that will add us in as a valid option when doing searches.
h3. Shorter URL linking
If you need to make a link to a DevZone article for any reason, you can now use a shortcut for that link. For example, take a look at an example URL: http://devzone.zend.com/article/4457-A-Practical-Guide-to-Data-Caching-with-Zend-Server That’s rather long and unwieldy. You can now however drop everything after the number, and replace the word ‘article’ with ‘a’. Making the drastically shortened URL: http://devzone.zend.com/a/4457
h3. Numerous small things
Including:
* Improved UTF-8 support!
* Performance enhancements
* Visual distinction between Podcasts, Original Content, and Links to other blogs
* Fixed HTML submission engine, to stop throwing errors on perfectly good HTML content
* and more!
One last word … Please do feel free to contribute content to DevZone! That contribute link in the upper right hand corner can get awfully lonely at times when noone is clicking on it!
14 comments to “Updates to Zend DevZone”
April 17th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Congratz Eli, great job on the new features!
=C=
April 17th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
No offence.. but it was about time
April 17th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
You are using invalid certificates for devzone.zend.com (only valid for www.), and I still haven’t seen anything regarding your PR stunt on conferences/cfp announcements (http://devzone.zend.com/article/1670-Extra-Extra-Get-Your-Conference-News-Here).
I find it extremely disappointing that Zend is actively working against the PHP project in the PR worlds.
And FYI: There is no ‘src’ attribute on the link elements, its ‘href’ (regarding your rel="canonical" implementation.. which looks totally wrong btw).
April 17th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Thanks for pointing out a few issues there bjori. The certificate issue is a known one that we are working on getting cleared up, and thanks for pointing out the src vs href in the link tag. That’s been there for a long time and I’ll get it fixed right now.
As far as the ‘PR stunt’ you are referring to, I honestly don’t know what you are talking about, please feel free to fire off an email to me to discuss this in more detail. Zend most certainly DOES want to work with PHP.NET in regards to PR about PHP and conferences in general.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Hi Eli,
You can add this tag to the head section of your HTML:
<link rev="canonical" href="http://devzone.zend.com/a/4470" />
Then tools like Simon’s bookmarlet can help people more easily discover your preference:
http://tr.im/revbookmarklet
There are a few people passionately debating a rel value to add to this, but many tools are using the API, so as long as it continues to be able to discover your preference, you’re good to go:
http://revcanonical.appspot.com/api?url=http://devzone.zend.com/article/4470-Updates-to-Zend-DevZone
Hope this helps.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:44 am
@shiflett
Since the whole rev=canonical debate is just getting started, <link rev="canonical" rel="self alternate shorter shorturl" href="…" /> would be better then just rev="canonical"
April 20th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Thanks For The New Features.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Thanks for the info Shiflett; however as you know, the standards/specs for this new way of linking to a shortened URL are very much up in the air, and I don’t want to rush and implement something before things settle.
And in any case, because of the design of DevZone’s URL structure at the moment, the rev=“canonical” concept simply doesn’t work well, as you are rarely served a page under what is considered the canonical URL. A rel=”“ concept, if one gets accepted/finalized at some point, would be much better for DevZone’s purposes.
April 21st, 2009 at 8:53 am
Congratulations, I thought something looked different today. After refusing it for years, you got me to set a gravatar image as well!
For the next bugfix: After saving a draft, the link to the unpublished article is invalid. So, when on http://devzone.zend.com//member/account (what’s with the double //, btw), I have one unpublished Article, and the headline is linked to http://devzone.zend.com/article/id-/show/newest. This always throws a Invalid Node ID error.
April 21st, 2009 at 9:05 am
I like the original content/linked content distinction very much. Makes me feel less bad for linking to our own site.
Now a feature request: I find it impossible to contact you (or any other editorial staff, for that matter). In a comment above, you asked someone to email you. How? As a contributor, this would make things easier, sometimes you just have a question regarding format or style.
And, lastly, I’ve seen requests dotted around in comments asking for when posts will be published. By now I think I know my stuff goes through, but adding a sentence to manage expectations (e.g. "usually within a week, unless we’re busy" or something) would improve things.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Great improvements. Looking forward to using that open search.
Cheers,
Nigel
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I’ll be looking into the bugs, incorporating the feedback, and putting a contact email address up here.
All good points, thanks.
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