I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

Incontestably the driving force behind PHP6 [...] Andrei Zmievski will be taking off for San Francisco to join a fresh young startup. Andrei's been a pivotal member of the PHP community for the majority of it's life.

As far as she knows, though, he's not moving away from working so heavily with PHP and the development group, but his employment move and setup time at the new company could cause a bit of downtime.