Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial edition of Eclipse plus the PDT plugin and various other additions. Unfortunately Zend decided to disable the Xdebug support of the Eclipse PDT plugin. Nonetheless if you'd like to use Xdebug for debugging your PHP scripts, follow these simple steps to restore the Xdebug functionality of Eclipse.

Its a simple six-step process (not including getting Zend Studio installed) to have the powerful debugging tool ready at your fingertips. You can find more information about setting up the tool here.

These courses further expand the portfolio of Zend training courses, which include PHP from introduction to advanced levels, as well as courses about PHP Security, creation of Rich Internet Applications, and the use of major Zend products.

Here's the details:

• Migrating Your Web Applications from PHP v4 to v5 - This webinar guides you through the basics of planning a migration, as well as discussing some of the tools to make the process easier, such as unit testing and PHPDoc. The current class will be held September 9th and 11th and will cost about $300 USD.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The Zend Studio for Eclipse Course is designed to provide PHP programmers with a practical, in-depth knowledge of the next generation tool in the Zend Studio IDE family. The current class will start August 25th and will run through September 5th. Cost for the class is about $800 USD.

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we've been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our "Best Practices" section. We've been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in!

The winners are Akrabat for his look at recursion and gerard for his article on CLI tips and tricks. They both have won their own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse, a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro magazine and a chance to have their article published on the magazine's site.

My buddy Pete MacIntyre has been after me to review his book for some time now and honest Pete, it's been sitting on my desk since it arrived patiently awaiting my attention. So last night I broke down and went through it. I'll have to say I was impressed with what I saw.

He (the reviewer, Cal) notes that, while the book comes in at about 180 pages - light for a tech book these days - to still gives a great overview of the technology for those already familiar with the Eclipse setup.

Not sure what the contest is about? Here's the rundown - to enter all you need to do is write up a best practices type of article and post it to the forum. That's it! You'll be entered to win fabulous prizes. The best two entries (as judged by the PHP Women themselves) will be awarded licenses for their very own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse as well as one year subscriptions to Linux Pro Magazine. One of these two winners will also get a bonus prize - to have their submission featured on the Linux Pro Magazine's website.

So what are you waiting for? Write up your article and submit it - time is running out!

The topic is "Best Practices" and all you have to do to enter is submit an article - long, short, good or bad - over in the Best Practices forum on their site. Want an example? Check this one out.

Now for the good part - there'll be two winners: the best two entries will get the top of the line prizes, licenses for Zend Studio for Eclipse) and, of those two, one will get inclusion of their article into a future issue of Linux Pro Magazine. The other will be gifted with a one year subscription to the same publication.

Others have already posted their articles - why haven't you? You don't have to be female or an expert in your field to contribute, just get out there and write something up for your chance to get in on the goods.

"The market for commercial web-based applications using PHP technologies is growing very fast in all geographies around the world," said Harold Goldberg, CEO at Zend Technologies. "Zend benefits from its strong position in this market, with an expanding list of major companies as customers and partners. We wanted to ensure that we continue our expansion and are therefore pleased to begin this partnership with TriplePoint Capital, a firm whose innovative approach closely aligns with our strategies in the web application market."

Zend is the company behind the popular Zend Studio IDE and the widely used Zend Framework rapid application development platform.

Enabling PHP-GTK2 code completion in Zend Studio 5.5 for a project is very simple. The following example is given on Windows, but the steps should be the same on any supported platform.

Screenshots are also included in the step-by-step process. You'll need to run a bit of code to build the completion file, but after that it's just a few quick clicks away.

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.