A while back the PHPClasses.org website announced that it would be changing its look a bit and allowing visitors to set up and configure their own look and feel as they chose. The editor to make these changes has finally been released and is ready for use.

The site is launching an editor that allows designs to propose new site design themes. This is the initial beta version of the site design editor, but it already allows any designer to try different presentation designs.

You can access the editor from here and it'll require a login to get in (to create your own custom layout). The system uses simple tag-based templating to wrap the content of the site in your look/feel of choice. You can even try it out on different sized resolutions to give you an idea of the template's flexibility.

As the time for this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo grows closer, there's more and more talk about who'll be there and what will be talked about. The Zend Developer Zone is taking the opportunity to do a little looking back - and having some fun in the process. They're hosting a ZendCon trivia contest for some fabulous prizes.

Let's have a little fun, shall we? Here is what we'll do. I'll ask ZendCon or PHP trivia via twitter (http://twitter.com/zendcon) and the first person to email me the correct answer at contest@zend.com will win a prize.

Up for grabs are ZendCon trading cards, books, elePHPants and copies of Zend Studio. Remember, you have to be following zendcon on twitter to get the questions and answers must be submitted via email (no DM, IM, tweets or IRC answers will count).

The PHP Women have officially announced the winners of their "Best Practices" article contest:

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we've been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our "Best Practices" section. We've been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!

The winners are Akrabat for his look at recursion and gerard for his article on CLI tips and tricks. They both have won their own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and a chance to have their article published on the magazine's site.

Along with mentioning their 9th anniversary, the PHPClasses.org website has announced a contest for all of those out there who want to help improve the look for the site.

One frequently received suggestion is to redesign the site. As I explained before, changing the site design is not a big issue. The greatest challenge is to change the current design to another that pleases more users than the number of users the change may displease.

So, to keep things interesting, he's had a contest out of it with the winner, besides having their design applied to the site, will get their every own elePHPant and a prize of at least $1000 USD. The winning design will be the main one for the site, but it is possible that paying subscribers could have the ability to define their own.

More to come on the contest in the following weeks...

Daniel Cousineau posted copies of his submissions to the PHP Women group's Article Contest (Best Practices) that finishes up today.

I made a few posts to the PHPWomen.org Article Competition and felt I should share them here.

His three submissions are:

• Flash Your Errors: It's Illegal In 28 States! on combining flash messages and error reporting
• David Copperfield Wasn't This __magical: __autoload() is Awesome! on using the __autoload functions and PEAR style namespacing
• Path Secrets Of The Most Awesome on making your path operations indestructible across operating systems.

There's still (a little) time to get your own submission in to the contest to get over and submit your article for your chance to win a copy of Zend Studio and maybe get your article featured in Linux Pro Magazine.

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.

Resulting from a conversation among developers at this year's PHP Quebec 2008 conference, a new event has been created to help test PHP against as many different configurations as it can be - TestFest.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event local UG are invited to join the TestFest. All it takes is a local organizer to spear head the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

The even will be announced sometime in March and its hope is to get as many people in the community involved to improve the language. There'll also be a raffle to give away 10 of the stuffed elePHPants as well as, for the ones who are "test worthy" and seem able to write up good tests on their own - commit CVS access to php.net as well as an official php.net account.

For more details on the event, check out this page on the (new) PHP.net wiki.

If you're headed up to this year's PHP Quebec conference, keep an eye out for Cal Evans and the Zend team. According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, they'll be giving away a free copy of the Zend Studio software.

If you are at PHP Quebec and want a chance to win a copy of Zend Studio, find either myself or John Coggeshall and give us your business card. I'll take them all, put them in a jar I keep just for these occasions and draw one at random and give that person a shiny new license to Zend Studio.

You'll need to still be around to win the big prize and keep an eye on DevZone to see who ends up taking it home.