In a new submission from Bogomil Shopov there is a new contest firing up wth WebDev Magazine that sounds a bit more interesting than your run of the mill contests.

The WebDev Magazine together with its enlisted partners is the organizers of the Balkan PHP programming/developing competition. The first stage has already been started and will reach completion on the 15th of July 2004 with the following task: Development of an encryption algorithm for communication.

• To be structured in two methods: name_encode and name_decode (see example);
• The possibility for the input of more than one parameter;
• The completed solutions are to be tested on versions from 4.2.x to 4.3.6. (or the latest version of PHP4 available when the evaluation is to be performed);
• If your script is for a specific version, please let us know by writing it on the attached file as well as any other stuff you'd like us to take into consideration;

They leave it up to your creativity as far as what the algorithm is like and what you want to encode, and the prizes are the usual items (Zend Studio, NuSphere's PHPEd, Activestate's Comodo), but one surprising thing is the last item on the first place winner - "a stack of beer". Sounds like good times to me.

For more information on this contest, see http://php.spisanie.com...