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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.

I am probably not the first to notice that, but thought it would be worth mentioning anyway. Zend have released version 6.0 of Zend Studio for Eclipse. Actually, this version 6.0 is the first final version of the Eclipse edition of Zend Studio.

He walks through this new version, commenting on everything from the interface to the version of PHP it cmes with out to an issue he had with updating (and how it was corrected).