Hey everyone,

My name's Christian (guy name traditionally, but I am female), and recently I took up a position as a Lead Web Developer for a start up MMORPG. I figured that since I was too young to have experienced the dot.com bomb from the late 90's, here's my opportunity to jump from corporate (priors: Earthlink, Disney, NeoPets, etc) and take a gamble with something completely different for a change.

Even better, I found myself with the unique opportunity to plan out a gaming/social networking site from the ground up. Which is a dream after what corporate environments have put me through. Also, the only concrete requirement of this job is that the site must be developed in PHP. Factoring in that this site would also necessitate high scalability, extreme speed, modular development, a robust caching scheme, dynamic templating, internationalization, and the works...I realized that I could be wasting a lot of time developing an in-house framework, before we even got the site off the ground.

So not being keen on reinventing the wheel, I went shopping. I looked at CakePHP, Symfony, Prado, PEAR, etc. And as evidence of my being here, Zend Framework was my final choice. I was also looking to extend ZF with Smarty, but figured that Zend Layout and Zend View are sufficient for our needs, and we can use Zend Filter to ensure that the templates pass the Dreamweaver Test for our to-be-hired front end markup and design team.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to on-boarding with this promising framework, and hope I'm making the right decision to use it. Nice to meet everyone, and forgive me for having a lot of questions. The tutorials and documentation seem a bit sporadic at this time.