php|architect magazine has started a program to help out those in need via the Red Cross. To encourage donations, they'll provide a free subscription for anyone giving $25 USD or more to the Red Cross' effort.

It is in the time of crisis that communities pull together to help those in need; the PHP community is no different. Past experience has shown the generosity of the PHP community and we know that many of you have already stepped up to help. All of us at php|architect want to encourage you to join us in giving to the Red Cross to support their relief efforts in Japan.

By forwarding the contribution confirmation email to the address in the post, you'll be sent a subscription coupon good for a free year of the magazine. You must have your email submitted by 5pm EDT on Friday Marth 18th to be considered.

On the LogicPool site there's a new post with a list of PHP+MySQL code generators you can use if there's not a specific framework involved in your application (most of those come with code generation tools already).

Some of these tools can rapidly build a fully functional application, but there's more to most useful applications than simply displaying a list of fields for users to fill out and viewing the results from an admin only accessible area. Most applications will need tweaks that can be small to large depending on the requirements. Keep that in mind when looking at these products as the amount of effort required to tweak the code produced by these tools.

Tools on their list (some free, some paid services) include:

• AppGini
• PPMaker 7
• ScriptCase
• Xataface

NETTUTS.com is having a give away of some free copies of the Packt book "Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide" for anyone that comments on the post.

Magento is one of the most popular PHP eCommerce solutions available for web developers. In their own words, it's the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world. Packt Publishing has generously donated a handful of copies of their latest Magento book, called "Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide".

The book goes into the depth PHP developers will need to really get into the heart of Magento and create customized modules with advanced functionality to make it just what you need.

On the Code Beach blog there's a recent post comparing a few of the more popular IDEs that you can write your PHP applications in (not all specifically targeted at PHP, of course).

This is a roundup of the available PHP IDEs both free and commercial. You will find a wide range in pricing (free to $400) and options available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X including PHPAnywhere which is a web-based IDE.

IDEs in the list include:

• NuSphere PhpED
• PHPEdit
• Dev-PHP
• Komodo Edit
• PHPanywhere

On the Zend Developer Zoen today Eli White has announced the winners of the free passes for this year's Zend/PHP Conference - five groups all across the PHP community.

As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It's now time for the announcements of who won! [...] To the end, the following groups are being chosen to each receive a free ticket, and they will get an email from me to start processing that soon.

The five groups that will be receiving their free pass are:

• Austin PHP Meetup
• Chicago PHP User Group
• Burlington, VT PHP Users Group
• PHPBenelux
• PHPWomen

Congrats to the winning groups! For all others, you can still get in on the early bird rates as long as you order before August 28th (plus there's all sorts of other discounts). Check out the registration page for more information.

If you're planning on attending the CodeWorks conference in your area (or where ever the closest stop might be), you might want to check out this extra incentive to register for your pass early - the possibility that your ticket could be free!

We're so excited that the schedule for CodeWorks 09 is finally online that we have decided to come up with a great promotion: if you sign up for CW09 before July 6th, your ticket could be free-or you could win a "Master Subscription" to all of php|architect's books and magazines! Read on for more info.

If you register before July 6th (just five days away!) you'll be entered into the contest to win one of several prizes, the top being a full refund on your ticket and a free pass to your CodeWorks city of choice. Other prizes include a "master" subscription to php|architect magazine and "master access" to all of their books.

Of course, there's some rules that go along with the giveaway, so be sure to look them over before you enter.

The Zend Developer Zone (and S&S) have announced a contest giving away five tickets to this year's ZendCon conference. How can you enter? Read on...

Zend and S&S support local PHP user groups, and will be providing a limited number of free ZendCon passes for user groups to distribute to active members who might not have the financial wherewithal otherwise.

There'll be five passes handed out to user groups - one to each of the five selected groups. To enteryour user group, get one of the organizers to submit a bit of information about the group and reasons why they think the group should be given a pass. Full details on what needs to be sent and where to set it all off to can be found in the full post. Good luck!

php|architect has kicked off another webcast series starting June 26th with ten great content-packed episodes leading up to the CodeWorks conference that are completely free to attend!

In collaboration with Microsoft's Interoperability Bridges & Labs Center, we're celebrating our upcoming CodeWorks 09 Conference tour with a series of completely free webcasts on a wide range of topics related to PHP 5, PHP 6 and many related technologies:

Topics will include looks at SPL, object modeling, PHP on Windows, date/time programming and PHP on Azure. Speakers include Matthew Turland, Stefan Priebsch, Scott MacVicar, Derick Rethans and Andrei Zmievski. You can register for them here - be sure to save your spot! They're filling up fast!

By way of a reminder about the upcoming PHP@FrOSCon event (sub-conference) and its Call for Papers deadline, Tobias Schlitt has posted this new item to his blog with all the details.

As usual, the PHP Usergroup Dortmund will maintain a PHP@FrOSCon event at this years Free and Open Source Conference in St. Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. While we created an (amazing) sub-conference for PHP there last year, we will have a project room this year. However, we want to have some great talks in there again (as we had 2 and 3 years ago) and therefore need your help as a speaker!

The deadline for the Call for Papers is coming up fast - May 23rd - so if you're interested in presenting be sure to submit your ideas (name, email, topic and abstract) today!

The Zend Developer Zone has shared a few links to some upcoming webcasts from Zend - three to be exact.

Zend has a series of free webinars on various PHP topics that is constantly ongoing. There are three of these webinars coming up on the schedule this April, and you do need to go and register for them ahead of time.

• WEBINAR: Set up a complete PHP environment in minutes!
• EBINAR: Advanced Management for PHP for i5
• WEBINAR - How to increase application performance using caching

The post has descriptions of each as well.