On his blog today, Vinu Thomas spotlights one of the major up and comers in the PHP-based eCommerce software package offerings - Magento.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

Padraic Brady has pointed out the "new kid in town" when it comes to magazines about PHP - Enterprise PHP:

There is a new PHP magazine called "Enterprise PHP" available in English, German and French which might even console those missing the apparently ill-fated International PHP Magazine. Back before publication the usual tree of suspects led me to being interviewed for the initial edition published a short while back.

The current issue (which you can get for free after a survey) has articles looking at testing your PHP scripts, how "professional" it is to use PHP and the fact that Java is not PHP (wait, isn't that backwards?)

The Builder.com.au website has a new tutorial posted today that looks at the dynamic creation of a web standard (PDF files) inside of a PHP script.

An alternative way of generating PDF files with PHP is using FPDF, a free PHP class containing a number of functions for creating and manipulating PDFs. The key word here is free. You are free to download and use this class or customise it to fit your needs. In addition to being free, it's also simpler to use than PDFlib. The PDFlib needs to be installed as an extension in your PHP package, whereas FPDF can just be included in your PHP script and it's ready to use

They show how to use the FPDF library to make some simple files - setting the title, author, adding images and text, etc. There's even a little bit there at the end about adding new pages to make more complex documents simple.

Jacob Santos has posted a list of things that he both likes and dislikes about one of Zend's beta offerings - Zend Neon.

I've been using Zend Studio Neon for the past three weeks and I have to say, for something that is free (beta software) it is quite good. Compared to using VS 2005, Zend Studio Neon has its advantages, since Visual Studio doesn't handle PHP well. Zend Studio Neon also has areas that I didn't like.

His likes included the fact that it's not Eclipse (technically) and that it supports PHPUnit and PHPDocumentor out of the box. Dislikes included the fact that it might not be free in the future and that it lacks FTP support.

Those of you wanting to go out to Codemash, listen up! (literallty). Michael Kimsal is giving away a free pass to this year's even that he'll be drawing for - but you need to listen to his latest WebDevRadio podcast to find out how.

The codemash organizers have graciously donated a free pass to the upcoming Codemash conference to be given away to one lucky webdevradio.com listener. To enter in to the drawing, listen to the codemash episode interview podcast on webdevradio with Jim Holmes, follow the instructions, and hope your name is drawn.

You can either listen to the episode right on the page, download the mp3 of the show or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great episodes.

As mentioned by both the Zend Developer Zone and Patrick Reilly on his blog Microsoft has officially announced their release of FastCGI for their IIS 6 web server version.

The IIS Team is eager to announce the official release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 as a free download. For the first time, we are providing hosters and PHP developers full support for a stack of technology that enables reliable, scalable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

Other bloggers mentioning this new release include:

• Gaetano Giunta
• Andi Gutmans
• Johnua Eichorn

Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.

There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)

Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.

Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.

Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.

Marco Tabini has posted a reminder about a promotion they (php|architect) are offering - a free iPod Touch when you purchase a training course.

n case you haven't yet seen it, our PHP Training iPod Promo is back for the third year in a row. This is one of our most popular promotions-possibly because it's simple and evil at the same time. I mean, how often do you get a brand-new (almost not even released yet) iPod Touch when you buy a training course?

This year the promotion is a little bit different because you'll receive two iPod Touch (16G) players (three credits required for two iPods). This promo applies to training purchased between September 18 and November 30th, 2007. To check out the great range of training opportunities php|architect offers, check out their training pages.

Going to the php|works conference and in the middle of a job search? Keep an eye out for Clay Loveless then - he and his company, Mashery, are looking for a few good developers and have a tempting offer as an incentive:

The company I had pleasure of co-founding last summer is once again on the prowl for top-notch, Zend Certified PHP developers. We're taking the hunt for these folks to php|works in Atlanta. Whenever possible, Mashery will be luring the quality developers with free beer. That's right: free beer that is free, as in beer.

They're also having a drawing for an 8GB iPod Touch for anyone that can prove they have recently taken the Zend Certification Exam.

Company description:
Mashery is the leading provider of web services and API management solutions enabling software-driven companies to unlock and accelerate their web services channel. With its on-demand, fully hosted solution, Mashery takes away the cumbersome process and plumbing around managing web services. Mashery provides all the ingredients required to get web services up-and-running quickly, easily and successfully while ensuring that they will scale: usage/access management, tracking, metrics, commerce, performance optimization and developer/community tools all come pre-packaged. Mashery enables web services providers to focus their time, resources and capital on building their core software, not on creating web services management infrastructure.

The Zend Developer Zone has both announced a winner for their ZendCon commercial contest and posted another contest on their site today:

Now for our grand prize winner, a free ticket to ZendCon '07: Chris McKinney [with his slogan to end the commercial] 'a shiny badge with your name on it!'

The next contest follows in a similar theme, but this time the prize at stake is three free nights at the hotel where the conference is being held, the Hyatt Burlingame. Entering this contest is even easier than the last one - especially if you're already headed to the conference. All you have to do is register before September 12th - it's that easy!