The WordPress platform has become one of the de-facto standards when it comes to blogging and content management sites. In this new post, though, SitePoint wonders if a new competitor in the market is enough to unseat WordPress from its high ranking - Ghost.

When someone mentions the term blogging platform your mind likely brings up thoughts of WordPress, or maybe Blogger.com. It did, didn’t it? While those two platforms have clearly carved out a respectable slice of the world’s blogging population, there remains a void left unfilled. This gap in platforms was largely created by the incredible popularity and growth of the blogging world itself. [...] This new entrant goes by the stealthy moniker Ghost. A fitting name really, given it’s unapologetic focus on no­frills web publishing.

They go through this new tool, spotlighting some of the features it offers and the extensibility it offers (complete with screenshots). While Ghost is a Node application (unlike its PHP counterpart) it's still relatively easy to get up and running. They do admit, however, that the title of the article is a bit inflammatory. Ghost and WordPress have different target audiences and widely different feature sets, but in the blogging realm, Ghost provides an interesting alternative.

If you're interested in hearing about MongoDB (and PHP) and are living on the southeast coast of the US, you're in luck - Derick Rethans is making a tour of the area and hitting several major user groups along the way.

It has been a while since I have written anything. In the last few months I have been busy rewriting the connection handling parts of the MongoDB driver for PHP. [...] Some time ago, my friend Ligaya Turmelle suggested that I should come and talk at the JaxPHP/JaxWeb, the PHP and web developers usergroup in Jacksonville, Florida. And while I was there, why not visit a few other user groups too?

From September 18th through the 24th, he'll be visiting the following cities (and bringing swag with him):

• Boca Raton, Florida
• Orlando, Florida
• Jacksonville, Floria
• Atlanta, Georgia
• Nashville, Tennessee

php|architect has officially announced CodeWorks 2012, a touring conference coming to 10 different cities all around the US, each one day long (September 25th through December 12th).

Codeworks, our annual one-day conference tour, is back for yet another year to bring a full day of learning, fun, and networking opportunities to a city near you! Like every year, we’re visiting ten cities on this year’s tour, with some familiar stops and some new venues added to our roster. Codeworks is a one-of-a-kind experience. We take most of our staff on tour, alongside a few trusted friends and colleagues, and organize a one-day conference with professional-grade presentations on hot topics for the PHP development world.

The stops on the tour for this year are: Buffalo, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Boca Raton, Madison, Memphis, Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles. Early Bird tickets are already on sale (just $25 USD) so you can pick up your pass and reserve your spot now!

In this new post to his blog today Brian Swan includes a video that's perfect for anyone wanting to know more about the PHP Manager for IIS but didn't have the time to get into it.

Last week, Ruslan Yakushev announced the release of the 1.1 version of the PHP Manager for IIS. I thought a tour of the PHP Manager functionality might work best in video format. I’d be interested learning what you think of the PHP Manager itself, but also in knowing what you think of the video format.

He covers me of the basics of the tool (except the installation, you'll have to do that yourself) including linking a version of PHP, managing php.ini settings, error reporting and working with extensions. If you're having trouble viewing it in his post, you can go directly to YouTube for it.

In a new post to his blog Keith Casey, a speaker on the CodeWorks conference tour, has recapped some of his experiences as a part of the five city tour.

Approximately 10 days ago, I finished the 2010 CodeWorks Tour. This time around with 4 speakers hitting 5 cities, it was smaller, more compact, and generally a little more intimate of an experience. Due to the odd nature of this one, I'm going to skip my usual "Good, Bad, Ugly" conference review format and go straight to some highs & lows.

He breaks it up into a few different topics - the venues (naming Portland as the champ), the presentations he gave and how they progressed over the course of the tour, the attendees, user group involvement and, unfortunately, the TSA hassle they had to deal with.

By my standards, CodeWorks 2010 was a success. By having a smaller team than last year, it was simpler and easier, but more importantly, the single-track nature kept everything focused, moving, and made sure everyone could participate together.

On the Internet Super Hero blog there's a recent post talking about a PHP event happening June 15th through the 21st visiting several German user groups (including ones in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe and Berlin) - the PHP BBQ Tour.

It is getting summer in Germany: let’s have a PHP BBQ tour! The PHP BBQ tour is one week tour from Monday, 15.06. - Sunday, 21.06.2009 visiting the german PHP user groups. The tour will go through Munich, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Dortmund, Hamburg and Kiel. The tour is an offering and a suggestion to the user group to come together for a barbecue instead of meeting in conference rooms in the middle of the summer, when the days are long. Everybody is invited to join me and other MySQLers on the tour to visit the PHP user group in his neighbor town.

Check the blog post for when they'll be in which cities and what will be happening while they're there. They've also set up a wiki page for more information.

Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch have officially announced the winners of the ElePHPant Would Tour competition:

First, many thanks to all the participants. Thank you to Zend, Adobe, php|architect and Ibuildings for providing prizes. Thank you to phpwomen.org for being out judges. Thank you to Damien Seguy for creating the elePHPants. Thank you most of all the the PHP community for being such a fun-loving bunch of nuts.

And the winners are:

• First Place - Stefan Koopmanschap, One Fell Asleep
• Second Place - Keith Casey, No, we're not taking any questions
• Third Place - Michelangelo van Dam, An Army of elePHPants

With the passing of the end of 2008, another thing has come to a close - the contest being held for the best elePHPant photo submission at the ElePHPant World Tour. In this new post they talk about the contest and some of the prizes the winners (first, second and third places) will win.

2008 is over, which means the Elephpant World Tour is coming to an end! The contest that started in September got over 240 entries! That is a whopping 60 elephpant pictures a month. The PHPWomen, who we managed to convince to be the judges for the contest, are now going to sift through all the posts and select 3 winners

Prizes include subscriptions to php|architect magazine, a copy of Zend Studio Professional, a ticket to the Dutch PHP Conference and a license key for the Flex Builder Professional software (from Adobe).

Stay tuned for the list of winners when they're posted!

On the Zend Developer Zone Cal Evans points out some of the upcoming Flex tour dates to local groups all around the United States and Canada.

The Adobe technical evangelism team will be hitting the road in October talking about our recent announcement with Zend. PHP developers who are interested in learning about Flex and Zend should join Kevin Hoyt, Danny Dura, Ryan Stewart and Christophe Coenraets as they show developers how to get started with Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and Zend.

Check out this list of locations to find one near you to attend. They run from the first of October through the first part of November.

Cal Evans and Ivo Jansch have started up a bit of a contest for those owners of elePHPants out there - the elePHPant World Tour (ewt08):

Here's the basic premise. It seems obvious that elePHPants love to travel. Equally obvious is the fact that a lot of PHP developers love to take pictures. So, let's combine the two. If you spot an elePHPant while traveling, like near a landmark, or making it's way through the airport, snap a picture. Upload it to flickr and tag it with ewt08. Thanks in no small part to a bit of Web 2.0 magic and Wordpress, we'll steal the picture from flickr and post it on the blog.

In January of 2009 the PHP Women group will take a look at all of the photos and pick the best ones. There's multiple prizes so far including a copy of Zend Studio Professional and admission to the Dutch PHP Conference '09 (check out the about page for more).