• An interview with Colin Hayhurst, co-founder of StackBlaze, on running a PHP startup
• A preview of PHP Summit 2012 UK
• Stefan Priebsch (thePHP.cc) on how to see the bigger picture (application architecture)
• 'PaaS: The Cloud On-Ramp For PHP Developers' (by Lucas Carlson of AppFog)
• 'Cryptography In PHP' (by Enrico Zimuel of Zend)

Once again, you can download this issue for free to enjoy!

Ok PHP fans, we don't do this often, but once a year we do give away a ticket to php|tek to one lucky programmer. This year, however, you are going to have to work for it. Starting Friday, April 13th, 2012, those of us who work at php|architect will tweet clues, and you are going on a web scavenger hunt. That's right, dig up other people's websites, trash their JavaScript and generally make a nuisance of yourself as you follow the clues to the…well, you'll just have to wait and see.

You'll need to follow the php|architect folks on Twiiter (Elizabeth Tucker, Marco Tabini and Cal Evans) to get clues about the hunt. First prize is a ticket to php|tek this year but other prizes include a ticket to their next Virtual Summit, any three books from their catalog and a free one-year subscription to the magazine.

Once you've found the solution, you'll need to enter it here to be entered. Good luck!

It is in the time of crisis that communities pull together to help those in need; the PHP community is no different. Past experience has shown the generosity of the PHP community and we know that many of you have already stepped up to help. All of us at php|architect want to encourage you to join us in giving to the Red Cross to support their relief efforts in Japan.

By forwarding the contribution confirmation email to the address in the post, you'll be sent a subscription coupon good for a free year of the magazine. You must have your email submitted by 5pm EDT on Friday Marth 18th to be considered.

Some of these tools can rapidly build a fully functional application, but there's more to most useful applications than simply displaying a list of fields for users to fill out and viewing the results from an admin only accessible area. Most applications will need tweaks that can be small to large depending on the requirements. Keep that in mind when looking at these products as the amount of effort required to tweak the code produced by these tools.

Tools on their list (some free, some paid services) include:

• AppGini
• PPMaker 7
• ScriptCase
• Xataface

Magento is one of the most popular PHP eCommerce solutions available for web developers. In their own words, it's the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world. Packt Publishing has generously donated a handful of copies of their latest Magento book, called "Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide".

The book goes into the depth PHP developers will need to really get into the heart of Magento and create customized modules with advanced functionality to make it just what you need.

This is a roundup of the available PHP IDEs both free and commercial. You will find a wide range in pricing (free to $400) and options available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X including PHPAnywhere which is a web-based IDE.

IDEs in the list include:

• NuSphere PhpED
• PHPEdit
• Dev-PHP
• Komodo Edit
• PHPanywhere

As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It's now time for the announcements of who won! [...] To the end, the following groups are being chosen to each receive a free ticket, and they will get an email from me to start processing that soon.

The five groups that will be receiving their free pass are:

• Austin PHP Meetup
• Chicago PHP User Group
• Burlington, VT PHP Users Group
• PHPBenelux
• PHPWomen

Congrats to the winning groups! For all others, you can still get in on the early bird rates as long as you order before August 28th (plus there's all sorts of other discounts). Check out the registration page for more information.

We're so excited that the schedule for CodeWorks 09 is finally online that we have decided to come up with a great promotion: if you sign up for CW09 before July 6th, your ticket could be free-or you could win a "Master Subscription" to all of php|architect's books and magazines! Read on for more info.

If you register before July 6th (just five days away!) you'll be entered into the contest to win one of several prizes, the top being a full refund on your ticket and a free pass to your CodeWorks city of choice. Other prizes include a "master" subscription to php|architect magazine and "master access" to all of their books.

Of course, there's some rules that go along with the giveaway, so be sure to look them over before you enter.

Zend and S&S support local PHP user groups, and will be providing a limited number of free ZendCon passes for user groups to distribute to active members who might not have the financial wherewithal otherwise.

There'll be five passes handed out to user groups - one to each of the five selected groups. To enteryour user group, get one of the organizers to submit a bit of information about the group and reasons why they think the group should be given a pass. Full details on what needs to be sent and where to set it all off to can be found in the full post. Good luck!

In collaboration with Microsoft's Interoperability Bridges & Labs Center, we're celebrating our upcoming CodeWorks 09 Conference tour with a series of completely free webcasts on a wide range of topics related to PHP 5, PHP 6 and many related technologies:

Topics will include looks at SPL, object modeling, PHP on Windows, date/time programming and PHP on Azure. Speakers include Matthew Turland, Stefan Priebsch, Scott MacVicar, Derick Rethans and Andrei Zmievski. You can register for them here - be sure to save your spot! They're filling up fast!