The Zend Framework team would like to thank everyone who made this release possible. As always, our generous ZF community has provided countless new features, bug fixes, documentation translations, etc. We'd also like to thank Adobe Systems and Wade Arnold for contributing the new Zend_Amf component. A big thanks to PHP Belgium and everyone who participated in bug hunt day and/or the Zend Framework bug hunt week.
This update includes lots of new components and features such as: an update to Dojo, Zend_Service_Twitter, support for Open Office Documents in the Zend_Search_Lucene component, Zend_ProgressBar, I18N improvements and much, much more. Check out the full list on this post on the Zend Developer Zone or just head over the download the latest edition.
You can also check out some of Matthew Weier O'Phinney's comments over on his blog as well as thoughts from Zend's own Andi Gutmanson his blog.
Pierre-Alain Joye has pointed out that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.2.x series (5.2.7RC3) has been posted for download.
PHP 5.2.7RC3 has been released. It is likely to be the last RC and the final release is planed for Thursday next week. Please test it and report any issue you may found. The sources can be fetched here and the binaries in the windows site.
The latest issue of php|architect magazine has been released - October 2008. Articles in this new issue include:
Alvaro Videla Godoy - The Propel ORM
John Mertic - Using Mixins with PHP
Forrest Lyma - Developing Digitalus
As well as the usual columns from Steph Fox, Jeff Moore and Marco Tabini. You can either buy the issue alone or you can subscribe and get a full year of high quality PHP goodness.
Christoph Dorn has posted about the latest release of a very handy PHP/Mozilla extension - FirePHP 0.2.
The release includes 27 bug fixes and feature enhancements. The scope of this release was primarily focused on improving the current feature set in terms of usability, reliability and support for logging complex objects. You can find the changelog here.
After installing the FirePHP 0.2 extension you will be directed to the Install page after your next Firefox restart. On this page you need to download the updated FirePHPCore library. Next you can visit the Learn page for information on how to get started with FirePHP. Finally refer to the Usage page as a reference for all supported features.
Some of the updates included in the release are for enhanced object logging, the addition of file and line information, full UTF-8 and Latin-1 support and an enhanced variable display in the console. Head over to the FirePHP.org website to get the latest version.
Packt Publishing has made an announcement about a new book that's just been released - "MediaWiki Skins Design" (by Richard Carter).
From their release notes:
This book takes users through customizing their MediaWiki skin. It is full of practical examples of MediaWiki skinning techniques, and provides a clear explanation of how MediaWiki skinning works and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki's appearance.
The book has appeal for both web developers and wiki administrators by helping them update the look and feel of their MediaWiki site. You can find more information on the book on its page on the Packt Publishing website.
We are excited to announce that the Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available from the Zend Framework download site! While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release.
Updates included in this release are things like the Zend_Amf component, an update of the Dojo toolkit, support for the dijit editor, some performance enhancements and other locale and internationalization changes.
You can download this latest release from the Zend Framework download page and be sure to log any problems you find into the issue tracker and help the ZF team make the framework even better.
The schedule is now online for PHPNW - there are a few slots still unconfirmed but this is the main body of the technical sessions that will be happening on the day. We've got some great sessions planned and we hope to see you on 22nd November 2008 in Manchester!
Speakers currently lined up for the event include Derick Rethans, Rob Allen, Zeo Slattery and Stefan Koopmanschap. You can get complete details about the event on the conference website.
In this post to his PHPJack blog Richard Heyes comments on the trending he's seeing in the Zend Framework and where its future might lie.
I have been critical of ZF in the past because the performance has pretty much been going down every release and I am not the only one seeing this, there have been a number of benchmarks that show this trend. Having contributed to ZF in the past I brought this issue up multiple times both on the mailing list and even during the meetings the past zendcons and it the general response was they where focusing on features not performance.
He points out a few things that were brought up at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including the performance focus of future releases, a push to 2.0 after PHP 5.3's release and some of the changes that can cause breaks in backwards compatibility.
Be sure to also check out Matthew Weier O'Phinney's response to the post and some of the comments Richard made.
Richard Heyes has pointed out an interesting little app that Lucas Baltes created to visually show the timeline of PHP releases from now back.
The timeline stretches all the way from the current PHP 5 release (bye bye PHP 4) back to some of the initial releases Rasmus made as the "PHP Tools version 1.0" back in 1995. Each entry is timestamped with when it was released and some of the more recent ones have "tails" showing how long their life lasted.
Lucas also links to the museum on the PHP.net website where all of these versions can be downloaded.
The SolarPHP framework group is happy to announce the release of the latest version of the PHP rapid application development framework - SolarPHP 1.0.0 aplha 2.
We're happy to announce the release of Solar 1.0.0alpha2. After almost a year of changes and improvements, this one has been a long time in coming. You can see the download-and-installation instructions here.
Changes include updates to Solar_Auth, Solar_Cache, Solar_Sql, some schema changes, additions of some new classes like Solar_Factory, Solar_Service_Akismet and lots more. Check out this blog entry for the complete list (along with what was changed in detail).
Oh yeah, did we mention the project now has a blog? Paul Jones and crew have whipped up a blog application (written with Solar, of course) they've launched to help the community keep track of the latest from the framework. The source for the blog will be coming soon for those who are looking to see how it all works.
