The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We’re delighted to announce the winner of our “I am” competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence “I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."

Amit Singh dropped me a note to let me know about a new community site he's developed to share PHP-related resources from all around the web (similar to DZone) called PHPCamp.net.

PHPcamp aims to provide a platform where everyone can bring interesting links, news and share their knowledge that are helpful to other web developers. It provides publishers with a chance to easily show their articles to others and gain some readers; most importantly it provides readers an easy way to keep an eye on latest things in PHP world, at the same time, giving them a chance to learn new things every day.

The site takes in user-submitted articles/blog posts/etc and they're dropped into the "freshly arrived" list for public consumption. If a link gets enough attention, its listed under the "getting hotter" and "boiling" sections progressively. Check out their blog for more information.

DevShed continues their series covering the CodeIgniter framework in this second part, a look at paginating the results of a database query for blog entries.

In this initial stage, the controller in question had a rather limited functionality, since it was only capable of displaying a bunch of blog entries that were previously stored in a MySQL table. [...] Nevertheless, in this second article of the series, I'll be explaining how provide the controller class built in the preceding tutorial with the capability for paginating blog entries.

Basing the enhancements on the code from the previous article, they update their controller to use the pagination library that comes with the framework to split up the results. The page number is based off of the third parameter of the URL.

In an effort to breathe as much life into an old bit of software he was having to update, Harry Roberts worked up a list of things that he sees can make things a bit more "programmer friendly" when it comes to using classes, methods and interfaces in your code.

His list of four is:

• Doc Comments
• Flexible Parameters
• Use method Entry contracts
• Be Stateful and Refactor

The "Doc Comments" is pretty obvious, but some of the others need a bit more explaining. Being flexible with your parameters is more about requiring the least from a developer, "entry contracts" being the restrictions to let the developer know what you're expecting and refactoring commonly used functionality into a easy, single point of contact.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

Padraic Brady has posted part seven of his series on building a blogging application with the Zend Framework as a base. This time he's working on the output of the entries - using Zend_View to standardize the look and feel.

In previous parts we've been using View Helpers without even noticing it. Zend_Form doesn't generate forms by itself, rather it delegates most of the HTML generation to a set of View Helpers like Zend_View_Helper_Form. The problem with such output, is that View Helpers can only generate XHTML 1.0 Strict output if we actually inform them of the standard to use. [...] What we should do, is make the Doctype of our View more dynamic. This is achievable by using the Doctype View Helper.

Padraic talks about the different parts of the View layer in the framework (helpers, partials, placeholders) that were mentioned in previous parts. He shows how to change up his current setup to work with the Doctype View Helper to change the view and make it UTF-8 compliant.

He shows the changes to the bootstrap file, how he's grabbing the entries from the database and how he pushes that out to the view to be displayed. He also creates a custom view helper to create the entry URLs for each of the posts (Wordpress users out there, these are the stubs).

Padraic Brady has posted part eight of his series guiding you through his construction of Zend Framework-based blogging software:

In Part 8 of the ongoing saga describing how to build a real world blog application using the Zend Framework we finally reach the point at which we concentrate on blog entries. At the end of this Part, we will be able to create and edit entries in preparation for Part 9 when we will explore displaying them to the world!

In this part, he shows how to add in the Entry controller with an Add action inside (and what code goes in them). He makes a Zend_Form extended form and throws in some validation, a use of HTMLPurifier and the code to push these entries into your database.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

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.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

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.

WebReference.com has posted part four (the final installment) of their "Building a Weblog" series today, focusing on creating the categories for the posts, adding a new entry, and updating a current one.

First off is the creation of the categories script - just a simple little page that takes in the category name (from a form) and inserts it into the categories table in the database. The next form functions in basically the same way, but handles more information. It lets you write and save a new blog entry to the database.

Finally, since everyone makes mistakes, they include a sample script to let you update one of your already posted blog entries, using the same kind of form you used to enter it.