Lorna Mitchell has posted some great news about the article contest that the PHP Women are running - prizes!

The article contest running on PHPWomen.org through July just got more exciting. We have asked people to post entries to our Best Practices forum. The authors of the best two entries will win copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse.

Besides the possibility of winning one of these licenses, entrants will also be entered into the running (two winners) to get a 1 year subscription to Linux Pro Magazine and have the opportunity for their article to be featured on the magazine's website.

The PHP Women have started up an article competition of all of those aspiring technical authors out there. All you have to do to enter is whip up something for their Best Practices section:

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 CodeIgniter blog has posted their latest "Community Voice" feature highlighting an article from Michael Wales:

This week, our Community Voice author is Michael Wales, a programmer, a father, an aspiring author, and an award winning Airman. For the past 3 years, he's been focusing the majority of his time on CodeIgniter. He is among the most consistent contributors to the community, has released numerous libraries and tutorials, and is one of the most highly sought after freelancers within the community.

Michael talks about some of his experiences in developing web applications - both CodeIgniter driven and not. He notes that the framework does allow him to look at things from "outside the box" a bit more since it takes the hard bits off his shoulders.

The Bakery, the CakePHP repository, has had several new components, articles and tutorials posted lately. Here's a list of a few:

• MySQL collation behavior
• Image Magick Resize Helper
• Tidy Output Filtering
• Setting SVN Ignore properties
• Release: Pure Cake Power in RC1

Be sure to check out The Bakery for more great articles, tutorial, components and helpers for this flexible framework.

According to this new post to the CodeIgniter blog, they've added a new feature to their Wiki - a link between them and the CodeIgniter forums.

Threads will be automatically created and linked for you via the discussion links found at the bottom of wiki articles. More details about this integration can be found at a blog post made in the ExpressionEngine blog, as well as a free ExpressionEngine extension to implement this on your own sites that utilize the ExpressionEngine wiki and discussion forum.

The plugin (the "Wiki Forum Talk" extension) bridges the two components and either makes a new topic when a new wiki entry is added or, if there's already a forum topic for the entry, it automatically links to it.

Kore Nordmann has published a new FAQ on some common questions he gets about character sets and content encoding.

After lots of questions recently on IRC about charsets and encodings, I decided to write up a FAQ about this. The FAQ can now be found in the article section of my website.

Questions answered include "What is the difference between unicode and UTF-8/UTF-16/...?" and "What does "multibyte charset/encoding" mean?" as well as topics like transliteration and character set support in PHP.

One of the more popular PHP community sites out there, PHPFreaks, has launched the completely reworked version of their site:

Recently there have been many changes to PHP Freaks. A significant change is the total rewrite and redesign of the main site. The old one was taken down after vulnerabilities were found in the source code. For the last couple of months we have been working on making what you are currently looking at now. The release has been postponed a couple of times, but people have been patiently waiting for the site.

They've added a blog to the mix (which this post is a part of) to help keep visitors up to date on the site's happenings and various other news from the admins. If you find a bug, let them know, otherwise - enjoy the new site and check out all of the same great content.

The Bakery (the CakePHP programmer's resource) has a few new articles, tutorials and components that have been posted lately. Here's the list:

• Preview and alter the SQL generated from Model::find()
• After 3 years, looking back and moving ahead
• Encrypted Cookie Component
• Open Flash Chart Helper: draw charts the Cake way
• Maintaining an Application-independant Code Library
• Rolling you own Gallery2 component
• DarkAuth v1.3 - an alternative Auth
• Easy AJAX Pagination Using JQuery

Be sure to check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related content.

The PHPEveryDay.com website has posted more tutorials recently - this time about working with Smarty.

• Smarty Template: Introduction
• Smarty Template: Installation
• Smarty Template: My First Smarty
• Smarty Template: Basics That You Must Know
• Smarty Variable: Associative Arrays
• Smarty Variable: Array Index
• Smarty Variable: Object
• Smarty Variable: Variable at Configuration File
• Smarty Variable: Reversed Variable

Check out PHPEveryDay.com for more great PHP articles and tutorials.

The PHPEveryDay.com website has posted some more tutorials recently - here's the list:

• PHP Network: Pinging Remote Hosts
• Web Content: Crawl Image Source a Web Page
• Web Content: Getting All URL in a Web Page
• Web Content: Reading Other Web Page
• Web Content: Forcing Browser Downloads
• Web Content: Calculating Script Execution Times
• Web Content: Protecting E-mail Address
• Web Content: Changing URL Text become Active URL

Check out the rest of the site for even more great tutorials and articles.