Zend Technologies, a provider of products for developing and managing PHP applications, has entered an agreement with Varien, the developer of the Magento e-commerce platform, to enable small- and medium-sized businesses to develop and deploy e-commerce web applications.

As a result of the new partnership, the Community Edition of Varien’s Magento eCommerce software will ship with the Community Edition of Zend Server, a PHP web application server. Varien will also be adding ecommerce features to the open source PHP framework, Zend Framework, part of the Zend Server.

Magento is an Open Source e-commerce platform solution whose interface features marketing tools and a catalogue-management engine. Zend Server Community Edition (CE) is a PHP application stack that can be used in development, testing and production. Zend Server CE is compatible with Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. Zend Server has also been made available in a commercial, enterprise edition which is a web application server for managing business-critical PHP applications.

By implementing Magento CE with Zend Server CE, small and medium-sized businesses can install and build shopping and other commerce-based platforms featuring catalogue and order management, analytics, SEO, merchandizing, customer accounts and shipping.