Not sure what the contest is about? Here's the rundown - to enter all you need to do is write up a best practices type of article and post it to the forum. That's it! You'll be entered to win fabulous prizes. The best two entries (as judged by the PHP Women themselves) will be awarded licenses for their very own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse as well as one year subscriptions to Linux Pro Magazine. One of these two winners will also get a bonus prize - to have their submission featured on the Linux Pro Magazine's website.

So what are you waiting for? Write up your article and submit it - time is running out!

To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding - here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven't thought of.

At the end of July, they'll take their two favorites out of the articles that've been submitted and hand out perpetual licenses for the Zend Studio for Eclipse software to the winners. Remember, you don't have to be female to participate - they're happy to take in content from anyone and everyone. Just sign up and add your topic to the Best Practices forum to submit - it's that easy!

Where do I start with my praise for Todd's entry? So much effort has been put into this entry its amazing. As a starting point you should first go have a look yourselves, Todd has helpfully already hosted it here. Let the praise begin..

Nick goes through the presentation of the application, the documentation provided with it, some sample code of the main portion of the app (a priorityQueue class) and the rankings that each judge gave it.

You can download your application and try it out for yourself.

So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.

In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.

I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.

Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.

Finally we have a result, it has taken weeks of judging and lots of hard work. The scores are ready and today I will first announce the runners up from the Top 6. I will then tomorrow announce the 3rd place, then day after that second, you get the idea. The scoring was based upon a point system in which each judge had to rank the top 6 in order. The points from each judge were then compiled and the final scores calculated.

The project was to write a script that helped a user find the shortest "distance" between two words by replacing one letter at a time. The three that were the runners up were created by:

• JB
• Maurice Fonk
• Rob Haynes

Come of the judges comments are also included in the post to get a feel for the thinking behind the rankings.

The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.

The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.

Registration is now open for the PHP Throwdown! A huge thanks to Ken Macke and Bill Barnett for helping with this. To sign up, go to our Sign Up! Page and get yourself registered.

The phpthrowdown is a competition to see just what can be done with PHP in a 24 hour timespan. Anyone is open to participate, either in teams or by yourself. It' happening soon (Jan 27th, 2007), so be sure to get your name in soon and get ready to code!

Check out what others are saying about the competition too:

• Codewalkers.com
• Symfony Project blog
• Ligaya Turmelle's blog
• Elizabeth Naramore's blog
• Ben Ramsey's blog

The PHP Throwdown gauntlet has been thrown down! We're in the planning stages of the competition, so if you're interested in being involved as a volunteer, drop me a note. We're also looking for some interesting ideas for our sample apps so if you have one of those, then visit the site and leave a comment or drop me a note.

The event will be happening at the beginning of next year (January 27th, 2007) and will be a competition to hack together the best application in twenty-four hours in one of the four (yet to be determined activities).