The folks over at Fortrabbit.com have officially announced the opening of their cloud-based, PHP-focused hosting platform:

We do managed hosting for over 5 years - a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.

They offer a "Bootstrap" service if you'd like to try it out. It supports PHP 5.4, APC, MySQL, Git integration, Composer support, SSH/SFTP access and DNS management. You can also add on memcache and SSL support if desired.

Rafael Dohms has started up a new project that wants to help developers get help on their broken code via collaboration with others - FixThatCode.com.

Coding is an art. There are many ways to paint an apple, but which is better? Most of the code we write everyday can be written in better ways to achieve different objectives. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh pair of eyes. Code quality can be observed through various identifying markers. Perhaps you're not aware of them, don't have time to look for them or are too caught up in the moment to notice? That's where FixThatCode.com steps in!

There's a few different categories you can ask for help in including "Make this code better", "Make this code faster" and "Give me feedback". So far there's some interesting examples to look at - mostly in the "Feedback" category as developers look to further their skills by learning from others. The site's still just starting out, but I could see it becoming a good resource to any community - not just PHP!

The project that strives to provide audio and video content to the PHP community has officially launched - ProTalk.

ProTalk is the brain child of Kim Rowan and Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems. A spark of an idea on IRC in July 2011 transformed into the site you see before you and we really hope you like it.

ProTalk's mission is to provide a central point of access to online audio / video content with a PHP focus. We hope to expand and include other programming languages in the future, but for now we're focussing solely on PHP and surrounding tools and skills.

All of their content is user-driven, so if you have a video or audio recording that isn't linked on the site, be sure to submit it to them and get it added to the site!

As of March 30th, the PHP community has a new resource to learn and grow in their favorite language - the Web & PHP Magazine (published by S&S Media).

This is an exciting time for PHP and an exciting time to be launching a new publication. [...] We think we've got a great selection of articles in this first issue of Web & PHP Magazine, and we hope there's something of interest for PHP devs of every skill level. Feel free to get in touch if there's anything that you'd like to see in next month's issue, or submit a piece yourself. As ever, we'll be out and about in the PHP community over the next few months, so don't hesitate to say hello.

In their inaugural issue, there's articles about the PHP UK Conference, Security and emerging databases. There's also an interview with Robert Douglass (Senior Drupal Advisor at Acquia).

They're also offering the issue for download directly from their site (as a PDF) with later issues coming to multiple platforms (like mobile devices).

The crew over at SitePoint have introduced a new PHP-specific resource that's looking to provide a good resource for those looking for community info and tutorials - PHPMaster.com.

PHPMaster is the latest and greatest in the SitePoint family, dedicated to bringing you the highest quality in tutorials from some of the web's best PHP Developers, as well as news and information on events in the PHP Community.

Tutorials posted so far include:

• Migrate from the MySQL Extension to PDO
• Monitoring File Integrity
• From Zero to Cloud: Settings up an EC2 Sandbox - part one, part two
• Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords

The PHP North West group has officially launched the website for this year's event - PHP North West 2009:

We're proud to announce the second edition of the PHP North West Conference, to be held on Saturday 10th October, 2009. Following from last year's successful debut, this event returns to bring a great mix of speakers and community from the north of England and beyond. With a local feel, there will be a packed day of talks from a range of speakers, socials Friday and Saturday night, and informal sessions running on Sunday for those making a weekend of it. We hope to see you there!

The site currently has links to their registration, Call for Papers and resources to use when linking to conference.

If you're looking to start up that next great PHP project and want a little guidance on how to get the ball rolling, you should check out these helpful hints from Michael Kimsal for launching a new web project.

My background is *not* marketing, specifically, although I've been involved in a number of web projects' launches or relaunches over the last 13 years. Having said that, I've found myself giving similar advice repeatedly, so I thought I'd recap some of that here.

A lot of the suggestions have to do with networking and social media - setting up a twitter account, adding a blog even if the site's not done, gathering emails of those interested - as well as the typical search for feedback and picking the time to launch (even if its not all ready).

Nick Halstead and crew have launched fav.or.it (yesterday), a social site that seeks to "bring blogging to the masses" and runs on top of the Zend Framework.

From their blog:

We have long talked about 'bringing blogging to the masses' and today we have released a new version of fav.or.it which we think moves a quite a few steps towards that goal. We hope that we have firstly simplified the interaction with blogosphere and in turn made it accessible to a whole new audience. And for the more tech aware users we hope we have a raft of features that will also appeal.

Some of the more important things the site can do include conversation tracking, identity management, simple and easy to use searching, integrated commenting and much more. Check out Nick's list for more great features or just make a login and check it out for yourself.

In a recent post to his blog, Michael Kimsal asks a question that I'm sure PHP developers everywhere are wondering - why did Google choose to go with Python as the programming language of choice for their new App Engine service.

TechCrunch is announcing Google's new "App Engine" service being launched this evening. The basic service is a full app stack hosted and managed by Google, providing a web framework (maybe I'm misreading this?) and the Google 'big table' database service. [...] My question is "why was Python was chosen instead of PHP?"

There's been some great responses since it was originally posted including everything from agreement to rationalizations for the move (though there is a fair amount of PHP and Python bashing going on - an obvious occurance).

Padraic Brady has pointed out the "new kid in town" when it comes to magazines about PHP - Enterprise PHP:

There is a new PHP magazine called "Enterprise PHP" available in English, German and French which might even console those missing the apparently ill-fated International PHP Magazine. Back before publication the usual tree of suspects led me to being interviewed for the initial edition published a short while back.

The current issue (which you can get for free after a survey) has articles looking at testing your PHP scripts, how "professional" it is to use PHP and the fact that Java is not PHP (wait, isn't that backwards?)