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.

They've already shown you how to get PHP-GTK code completion working in the Zend Studio IDE. In this new post they show you how to do the same with Eclipse running the PDT extension.

Enabling PHP-GTK2 code completion in Eclipse PDT for a project is very simple. The following example is given on Windows, but the steps should be the same on any supported platform

It's a simple eight step process (the steps are little) to get support working. You'll need to use the Gtk_Dumper to get the info the IDE will need for the completion.

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!

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial (login required) showing how to use the Eclipse PDT functionality to debug scripts your PHP development.

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) plug-in, when installed with Eclipse Europa, gives you that ability to quickly write and debug PHP scripts and pages. PDT supports two debugging tools: XDebug and the Zend Debugger. Learn how to configure PDT for debugging PHP scripts and discover which perspectives you use when taking closer looks at your scripts.

You'll need to have a machine with PHP, Eclipse, Apache and the PHP Development Tools already installed to follow along (as well as a trial version of the Zend Studio Web Debugger). They also include the methods for setting up XDebug as the debugger.

The Zend Developer Zone as posted a new screencast from Zend about the event debugging functionality offered with their Zend Platform product.

Zend Platform is a powerful tool both in development and in production. [...] One of the cool features of it is the Event Debugger. Here's a short screencast that demonstrates how it works and how it integrates with Zend Studio for Eclipse.

The screencast is only about three and a half minutes long, but they cram a lot of screenshots and output results into that time. Cal Evans himself does the narration.

On the Developer Tutorials website Akash Mehta has posted a tutorial showing how to debug your CakePHP applications with the help of the Zend Studio for Eclipse software from Zend.

After I recently upgraded to Zend Studio for Eclipse, I noticed one troubling feature of my setup - I couldn't debug applications with "pretty urls". [...] In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make use of that power and debug your Cake applications with Zend Studio for Eclipse.

His is a four step method of simple things to get the connection working:

• Disable all .htaccess files
• Add "index.php" to pretty URLs
• Set a breakpoint to debug
• Debug your application using /index.php/ URLs

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz has blogged about an upcoming event that's an effort to "help foster community outreach and growth" around the Eclipse PDT project - Eclipse PDT Bug Day (May 30th).

Since there are more and more people in the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) community that start asking for diversity in the development side, Nick Boldt has suggested to help out and contribute patches to the project "if there's Zend folks willing to coach me...". Actually, I am very excited from his (and others) proposal, since it's the first time a group of people have stated that they want to contribute to PDT.

The event will happen on May 30th, 2008 and an effort will be made to squash as many from this list as possible (as well as potential others that might be found along the way). You can get more information about how to participate and help out the PDT project on this page on the Eclipse site.

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post about the release of the latest version of the NetBeans IDE, 6.1.

Feature-for-feature, Eclipse and NetBeans are well matched. In fact, because they are both extensible, any feature gaps between the two can be filled in with third-party plug-ins. Eclipse and Netbeans are rapidly approaching the capabilities of commercial offerings. Most developers won't need more than what these two excellent development platforms provide.

A (very) brief list of the features of the two is also included, their similarities including SVN support and syntax checking.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial posted showing how to create a web service with the combination of PHP and the Eclipse IDE.

Learn how to build Web services in PHP using the PHP Development Tools plug-in in Eclipse Europa. Become familiar with the PDT project, and learn how to create and deploy useful PHP projects, learn about the philosophy behind contract-first development, and understand the basic parts that make up a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.

You'll have to register/sign in to get to it. They give an introduction to the PHP Development Tools for Eclipse, creating a WSDL file visually in the IDE and integrating it all to work with your Eclipse front-end.

Ed Finkler, a long-time user of SFTPDrive on his Windows machine, has noticed something a bit odd lately when using the new Zend Studio (Eclipse):

For some reason, ZSfE just doesn’t show me my “k:” drive (the SFTP mount) when browsing for a project directory. This throws a real wrench in my usual workflow �" ZS 5.5 had built-in SFTP support, and I could also use the local mount if I wanted.

Finding nothing in the traditional places, he's made this blog post hoping someone might have the answer. Turns out that the fix (as provided by Josh Johnston) is to create a new project around a new Remote Folder.