Opening my mailbox yesterday welcomed me with a brown paper envelope addresses to “Herr Cornutt” and postmarked. I was confused since I wasn’t expecting any bit of German to be coming my way. I was happily surprised, though, when I opened it to find the free issue of Enterprise PHP, one of the newest offerings into the PHP magazine category.

The publication is from the IT Republik folks and is a nice looking magazine. It comes in at about 50 pages but it has a good ad to story ratio so you don’t feel slighted. Stories include:

• Test ’em all! (by Sebastian Bergmann)
• Worlds apart… (by Patrick Lobacher covering PHP intagration and SAP systems)
• an interview with Jens Paul Berndt about decisions regarding PHP
• a case study of the Fiat Group SpA’s use of PHP in their systems
• and the cover story, “Java is not PHP”

The quality of the articles if good – it’s interesting to see their use of so much clip art as illustrations. I suppose its due to the different audience than some of the other magazines. It’s less about the development and more about the high-level thoughts and processes behind PHP in business – how it can function in their corporation (or small business!) and what sorts of considerations need to be made. The articles are good quality and keep consistent with the tone of the magazine. The quality of the printing is nice too (always a plus) and the thicker pages make the “enterpriseness” of it all feel even better.

Oh, and let’s not forget about two articles by Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone! One covers several of the popular PHP frameworks and the other about how PHP security has advanced in the past few years.

If you get a chance and want to check out something a bit different in PHP Magazines, head over and grab a trial issue of this newest addition to the PHP publication world. Here’s hoping we’ll see great things from them!