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!

To help "sweeten the deal" a bit and encourage you to give towards the causes that the PHP Women are trying to accomplish, they're offering a special little bonus for those who donate at a certain level:

Cal Evans from the Zend DevZone - being the awesome guy that he is - has graciously offered to mail out to the first 10 people who donate to PHPWomen $50 or more, a PHP elePHPant. Yep - you get one of the hard to find and much sought after plushy PHP elePHPants.

You can find out more about the goals for their fund raising in this other post to the PHPWomen.org blog as well as information on submitting whatever you feel like donating (time or money).

For all of you out there that didn't get a chance to listen in on the live PHP Women podcast that the Zend Developer Zone put on, you can grab this latest podcast from the site and get in on all the good stuff.

Regular listeners are probably getting tired of hearing me say this, but today we are going to do something a little different. Back in October of 2007, PHPWomen passed their first birthday. It's taken me a while to get everything together but finally, I got a chance to sit down with four of the charter members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon and talk about the first year of phpwomen.

As usual, you have three options to get your own copy to listen to - add the feed to your favorite aggregator, listen directly on the page or just download the mp3. Check out the PHP Abstract homepage for links to even more great shows (29 episodes strong!)