The eZ Components project has release their latest stable version - 2008.2 - for public consumption today:

The development team is happy to announce the release of the seventh major version of eZ Components: version 2008.2. The main new development of this release is focused on the MvcTools (and accompanying) components.

The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework, providing a dispatcher, request parsers, routing, view support and a response writer. Examples of its use can be found in the subversion repository for the project. You can see the full Changlog for the release here and you can download the latest release here.

As Roy Ganor noted in a recent tweet - the long-awaitedversion 2.0 of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) extension for Eclipse has been released:

PDT 2.0 was designed based on principles different to those of Eclipse PDT 1.0. For example, different techniques were used to model workspace projects. PDT 2.0 now uses an indexing and caching mechanism for improved performance and experience with code assist and navigation. Moreover, since PHP provides enhanced Object-Oriented features like inheritance and polymorphism, PDT 2.0 provides enhanced features such as type hierarchy, override indicators and type navigation for programmers who utilize these language properties.

The extension is now lighter and faster, making better use of the Eclipse framework for caching/indexing language elements. The release also includes a method for configuring your buildpath, a "mark occurrences" feature, an icon that notes overrides, improved code assist and much more.

You can grab this latest download from a Eclipse PDT page off of the Eclipse site.

On his blog today Gopal Vijayaraghavan has posted about the release of the latest version of the APC sofware (Alternative PHP Cache) - version 3.1.2.

Finally, after nearly a year of work, it's into a release. Some new stuff has sneaked into it undocumented, that people might find interesting - apc.preload_path would be one of them. The backend memory allocation has been re-done - the api part by me and the internals by shire. There's a hell of a lot of new code in there, both rewritten and added. Tons of php4 cruft removed, php5 stuff optimized, made more stable, then less stable, made faster, then applied brakes. Made leak-proof, quake-proof and in general, idiot-proof. So, on & so forth.

To show the difference, he includes a diff of the current version against the previous - 68 files changed, 3255 insertions and 5545 deletions.

Adam Hosker has posted some of the differences between PHP4 and PHP5 to help you make the transition.

He's broken it up into a few different sections:

• Language Features
• Objects
• Magic Methods
• Selected New Extensions
• Error Management

Each of the sections has several subpoints detailing changes, updates and tips. The post is a part of his studies working up to talking the Zend Certified Engineer test.

The latest version of the Zend Framework, 1.7.0, has officially been released:

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 Gutmans on his blog.

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.

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Cal Evans has yet again upgraded his WordPress install and has list his quick and dirty process in a new post to his blog.

The eleven step process includes making a work directory (so you don't copy over your current install and all of its lovely plugins and templates) and copying over a few key files to update to the latest release:

• Copy blog.original/wp-content/plugins to blog/wp-content/plugins
• Copy blog.original/wp-content/themes to blog/wp-content/themes
• Copy blog.original/wp-content/uploads to blog/wp-content/uploads
• Copy blog.original/wp-config.php to blog/wp-config.php
• Copy blog.original/.htaccess to blog/.htacces

For more information on upgrading your WordPress installation, check out this entry on their wiki.

Fabien Potencier has a new post to the symfony framework's blog today talking about some more of the "little things" they've added to the latest version of the framework.

Symfony 1.2 already comes with a lot of great new features but smaller things also matter a lot. Here is yet another post about small things we have recently added to symfony 1.2.

The list includes the ability to generate a URL in an action using the routing object, new methods in the form object that make it simpler to use in templates and an update to the Phing/Propel interface to help with debugging.

Manuel Pichler points out that the latest version of phpUnderControl (an add-on for CruiseControl, a continuous integration tool) has been released - 0.4.3.

I currently released a new version of phpUnderControl. Beside some minor fixes this release comes with a new feature to aggregate test results of multiple PHPUnit runs. Use the new cli command merge-phpunit of phpUnderControl to merge multiple log files produced with PHPUnit, as shown in [this] example build file for ant.

He defines the XML file to set up the merge for the different PHP binary versions and the merge script to use. A screenshot of the result as presented inside the tool is included.