A little over 2 years ago we started our company blog, mainly to share our experiences and show off cool stuff we were doing. By now, it has become the most popular area of our website, and looking back I can see we have had a nice mix of technical articles, case studies, reviews, conference reports and 'php in business' posts.

Today, we are moving another step forward. Last year we announced our PHP Centre of Expertise to promote the professional use of PHP. One of the first visible results of the PCE initiative is our new techPortal.

I'm the kind of guy that buys a new gadget, ignores the manual and just starts to play with it. The same with software. If you need a manual to use it, then it's not intuitive enough. However, as things get complexer and more feature rich, it gets harder to simply discover all the useful features; it took me about 3 months before I accidentally discovered that my new iPod classic has a nifty context menu if you hold down the center button more than a second.

This is what manuals and books are useful for. To find the features you haven't discovered yet, but that turn out to be extremely useful.