Resulting from a conversation among developers at this year's PHP Quebec 2008 conference, a new event has been created to help test PHP against as many different configurations as it can be - TestFest.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event local UG are invited to join the TestFest. All it takes is a local organizer to spear head the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite.

The even will be announced sometime in March and its hope is to get as many people in the community involved to improve the language. There'll also be a raffle to give away 10 of the stuffed elePHPants as well as, for the ones who are "test worthy" and seem able to write up good tests on their own - commit CVS access to php.net as well as an official php.net account.

For more details on the event, check out this page on the (new) PHP.net wiki.

If you're headed up to this year's PHP Quebec conference, keep an eye out for Cal Evans and the Zend team. According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, they'll be giving away a free copy of the Zend Studio software.

If you are at PHP Quebec and want a chance to win a copy of Zend Studio, find either myself or John Coggeshall and give us your business card. I'll take them all, put them in a jar I keep just for these occasions and draw one at random and give that person a shiny new license to Zend Studio.

You'll need to still be around to win the big prize and keep an eye on DevZone to see who ends up taking it home.

php|architect is hosting a coding contest that started on Saturday. The task is to grab the contents of an HTML file and grab all of the links out of it, removing duplicates.

You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don't need to worry about them being relative or absolute.

It should be able to be called from the command line and return the links, one per line. They include how the scripts will be measured (speed, accuracy, etc) and the prize list - $100 gift card for phparch.com, a one year subscription or *drum roll* an autographed picture of ProPHP podcast hosts Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates.

To submit your entry just email it over to c7ycontests@phparch.com with the subject of "C7Y Contest - February" on it.

The Zend Developer Zone has both announced a winner for their ZendCon commercial contest and posted another contest on their site today:

Now for our grand prize winner, a free ticket to ZendCon '07: Chris McKinney [with his slogan to end the commercial] 'a shiny badge with your name on it!'

The next contest follows in a similar theme, but this time the prize at stake is three free nights at the hotel where the conference is being held, the Hyatt Burlingame. Entering this contest is even easier than the last one - especially if you're already headed to the conference. All you have to do is register before September 12th - it's that easy!