As a reminder, if you haven't gotten your entry in for the PHP Women article competition you only have a few days left - the contest ends on the evening of July 31st.

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!

We've mentioned it before but we just wanted to remind you again about the article contest that the PHP Women are holding with fame and glory going to the winners (oh, and there's prizes too).

The topic is "Best Practices" and all you have to do to enter is submit an article - long, short, good or bad - over in the Best Practices forum on their site. Want an example? Check this one out.

Now for the good part - there'll be two winners: the best two entries will get the top of the line prizes, licenses for Zend Studio for Eclipse) and, of those two, one will get inclusion of their article into a future issue of Linux Pro Magazine. The other will be gifted with a one year subscription to the same publication.

Others have already posted their articles - why haven't you? You don't have to be female or an expert in your field to contribute, just get out there and write something up for your chance to get in on the goods.

Lorna Mitchell has posted some great news about the article contest that the PHP Women are running - prizes!

The article contest running on PHPWomen.org through July just got more exciting. We have asked people to post entries to our Best Practices forum. The authors of the best two entries will win copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Besides the possibility of winning one of these licenses, entrants will also be entered into the running (two winners) to get a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro Magazine and have the opportunity for their article to be featured on the magazine's website.

Blake has posted some of his opinions on "best practices" that can help you land that new job you've been looking for:

The last couple of weeks have been quite the experience for me. I was part of a big layoff at my former company, which was interesting. I've never been in that position before, and it's hard not to take it personally. [...] Before the face-to-face portion, I chatted with the owner and head programmer on a conference call, and they ended up sending me a technical assessment quiz.

In the quiz, there was one question the prompted him to come up with his tips - ten things that you can do to keep your code clean, lean and easy to maintain. His tips include things like "use single-quotes around array indexes", "don't use open short tags" and "document your code". Some of the suggestions don't make that much of a difference, but others (like the documentation one) can make the world of difference down the line.

The PHP Women have started up an article competition of all of those aspiring technical authors out there. All you have to do to enter is whip up something for their Best Practices section:

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!

In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog Akash Mehta talks about a web application, PHPBench.com, that runs real-time benchmarks comparing some of PHP's own structures (like for versus foreach or echo versus print).

The benchmark suite covers all the usual bases, taking a simple task - like iterating over an array - and speed testing almost every possible way to achieve it. Most importantly, however, Chris takes raw numbers out of the spotlight and instead focuses on how the options compare with each other.

Since the results are generated live, they'll change a little bit each time the page is loaded. Each also includes a link to the code behind the benchmark so you can test it on your own system easily.

The Zend Developer Zone has another podcast posted from its ZendCon Sessions series. This time it's Wez Furlong's talk about sending mail from PHP.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Wez Furlong present "Best Practices for Sending Mail from PHP".

There's three options for listening to the show - you can either: listen to it on the page with the built in player, download the mp3 directly or subscribe to the feed to get this and future (and past!) episodes. Perfect for those who weren't able to attend the event...

Laura Thomson points out that she and Luke Welling will be presenting their "PHP Best Practices" talk at the upcoming ApacheCon (in Atlanta, Georgia starting November 12th).

This is a half day tutorial which we try to tailor to what people want to hear about on the day. We'll get into the nitty gritty of writing clean, fast, secure code.

Registration for this year's event is still open and there'll be other PHP-related talks including Christian Wenz's look at web services and Chris Shiflett's "Writing Secure Web Applications with PHP".

Sebastian Bergmann posts about the tutorial he (and fellow developers Matthew Weir O'Phinney and Mike Naberenzy) will be presenting at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo - a look at PHP Development Best Practices and Unit Testing.

From the official description:

PHP development by teams of developers introduces challenges beyond the mere coding of great algorithms. Agreements are needed about tools, specifications, architecture, design patterns, coding standards, testing, documentation, source code control, staging and deployment. This tutorial session aims to introduce developers to a set of best practices that will help them deliver applications fast and move them to deployment with confidence.

You can check out some of the other tutorials for the upcoming conference as scheduled here.

As anyone who's been developing applications (web or otherwise) knows, there are certain things that you just don't do when you're doing things like adding features or changing the code of a production application. There are some general rules to follow and this new article on the PHPClasses.org website reminds us of just a few.

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

Included in his list are things like:

• Handle unexpected conditions Test your code
• Monitor your site errors and act upon them
• Do not disclose errors to the users
• Do what you can as you can never get defensive enough

He also recommends two resources for some additional reading - the Wikipedia entry for "defensive programming" and a chapter from Getting Real (from 37 Signals) about how to "Get Defensive".