If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions). [...] Aside from a few additions, it was mainly bug fixing in this release. The biggest changes happened in the fileinfo extension.

The Windows infrastructure has been moved off on its own with lots of different binaries to choose from. The next version could either be another alpha release or make the jump up to beta - feedback for the aplha2 and the namespacing inclusion will make that determination.

That right, fire up those down-loaders and grab your headlamp and pick-axe. There's fresh code to be had for the taking! You can download Zend Framework 1.6 here Zend Framework Download Page.

Lots of changes made their way into this new release including the Zend_Tool component, built-in pagination, a new CAPTCHA form element, the Zend_File_Transfer component and much more as they also closed over 280 tickets with bugs for this release.

There's also a note about the Zend Framework documentation and how it can now be downloaded from zend.com (free registration required) in a much more portable PDF format.

Since this year's conference is a combo with PyWorks (Python topics), you'll find presentations on both sides of the fence (as well as general web development topics).

PHP talks include:

• Caching for Cash
• Get Soaked: Streams, an In-Depth Look
• The CodeIgniter Framework
• Enterprise PHP

And Python topics like:

• Building Web Applications with Grok
• URL Mapping with Routes
• IronPython: Python on .NET and in your Browser
• Desktop Applications with Python and Dabo

Check out the schedule for the full list and the conference website for details on pricing, the area the conference is in and to register and reserve your spot today.

As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.

The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.

After more that two years of development, the Propel team has released Propel 1.3 yesterday. This is a great achievement as Propel 1.3 sports a lot a new exciting features.

These features include PDO integration, object instance pooling, improvements to the date handling features and the addition of more default values for database schemas. There's also the updates with Doctrine:

As announced in the symfony 1.2 roadmap, Doctrine 1.0 will be officially supported and the sfDoctrinePlugin will be bundled with symfony 1.2. Doctrine 1.0 beta1 has been released two weeks ago and the Doctrine team will release Doctrine 1.0 final on September 1st.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release.

Issues corrected by this release include an upgrade to the PCRE version, a crash bug in imageloadfont and the open_basedir handling in the curl extension. You can download this latest release from downloads page on the PHP.net website.

• Johannes Schluter looking at the actual release
• The PHP 10.0 blog mentioning the impact this new release will have on the language and the web
• and a few tests that Lars Strojny has already run on the release.
• Evert Pot's look at some of the upcoming features of PHP 5.3 (including code)
• Some testing from PHP Freaks
• A note about some testing with the Stubbles framework

You can check out this page on the PHP.net wiki for more information on what's left for the final release and a tentative schedule for the releases in between.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

Among the list of new features/improvements are things like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions, closures, support for mysqlnd and removal of support for pre-Windows 2000 systems. For more information on when the full stable version will his the web, check out the release plan.

The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.

He looks at the new architecture of the framework, how it now handles forms, the improvements to the plugin system and the (partial) integration of the Propel ORM layer for accessing databases. The full listing of updates can be found here.

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less.

New features will have to go through either him or Johannes to be included and they are doing their best to get the alpha 1 release of this new version out by July 31st.

Lukas is also trying a more unconventional approach to bug fixes to try to get the major ones knocked out first - posting them as a comment to this blog post. So far, no comments on bugs have been added, but there are a good number to get through. To help narrow it down he's also put out a plea to developers out there to help validate current bugs to potentially knock off a few of the ones that can be marked bogus.