So you've seen all of the pictures of the elePHPants floating around and want to get your hands on one of your very own? Good news! Damien Seguy and crew have another fresh batch of huggable blue PHPness on the way and you can place your order now:

If you have missed the boat of the first generation of elePHPants, now is the right time to catchup up and participate to the 2008 generation! As for the first generation, this project is open to every PHP User group and aficionados, that want to adopt elePHPants, small or big.

Pricing is 4 Euros per elephant (in a 50 count box only) or 50 Euro for one of the larger elephants. They're even open to having company logos ("your own brood") added to the other side of his back. You can find more details on getting your hands on one at this page on the Nexen.net website or just head right to the order form to get a little blue PHPer to call your own.

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.

Christopher Jones is trying to bribe you to come to this year's PHP Quebec conference - he'll give you an elePHPant if you show (as sponsored by the OTN).

This year's PHP Quebec conference will be happening March 12th through the 14th in Montreal at the Sofitel Montreal Hotel. There's still spots available and you can still register (only 20 days left!) on the conference website. You can purchase tickets for just the conference, for just the PHPLab event or you can bundle them both together and attend both events.