I've been asked a lot of times which is the best PHP framework. Well, it's a very difficult question to answer this question and there are some pros and corns in each framework. So, today I would to hear your views via poll.

Included in the list are CakePHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter. Coming out with around forty-three percent of the votes, though, is the Zend Framework with CakePHP following with twenty-two percent.

Well it took a bit of time but after quite a few months a new release of Seagull is finally out, 0.6.3 (0.6.4). Things have been keeping pretty busy with the startup I'm working on, but it's been a great opportunity to refine some features of the framework and optimize the performance. The early indications are good, after less than 10 weeks of going live Kindo users are creating up to 20k profiles/day and the server load is staying comfortably below 0.5.

The update is a different download that helps correct an issue with the framework allowing user-inputted values from the GET string. Be sure and update your version to keep this security issue under wraps.

On Friday 20th July I finally deployed a site which we as a team have been working on for a number of months. Working on the project has been a huge learning curve and has taken way longer than ever expected. The site which I am talking about is http://bd4d.com, which stands for By Designers 4 Designers is built using the seagull php framework with the new cms module

The review is broken up into two key sections: General Comments (Media Temple install, useful plugins, paypal) and Site Features (showcase, events, job board).

Version 0.6.1 of the Seagull framework was released last week, download it here. There's been a gap of 4 months since the last release due to the main devs being busy with contracts, nevertheless quite a few important fixes and improvements have been added to the project.

Some of the improvements included in this release are:

• errors encountered in production mode are handled more gracefully
• added possibility of passing arbitrary args to CLI requests
• the comment module enhanced with Akismet integration and captcha
• the library cache can now be controlled using the standard Config gui
• many PEAR and translation updates

New frameworks are being released almost every other day in the PHP community. With over 40 frameworks available it's difficult to decide which framework works best for you, especially as each framework offers different functionality.

There's ten on their list, including the ones mentioned before and others like eZ Compontents, CodeIgniter, PHP on Trax, and the Seagull Framework. For each of them, they list out three to four bits of information about features/bundled modules/unique functionality/etc. It's some pretty good information, but I wish they'd also included one other thing for all of the frameworks - links to their homepages.

After 3 release candidates stable version 0.6.0 of the Seagull framework was released last week, download it here. Blame it on the heat wave this summer in the UK, we broke our "1 release per month" mantra for the first time in 3 years, but I think the results were worth waiting for.

There's information included about how to install (minimal and developer versions) as well as some of the improvements made, including:

• automated module installation for admin users, and improvements to the module generator wizard
• mproved wizard functionality based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller (Malaney J. Hill)
• nice CAPTCHA component (Steven Stremciuc)

You can get complete information on the framework on its site and grab the download here.

Thanks to Daniel Pallet over at http://www.phpit.net/ for his recent article comparing 10 PHP frameworks. It's a pleasant surprise that based on the checkmarks for features marking scheme, Seagull came out with the top score. A lot of complaints from the other contestants "you didn't give me credit for this" - I guess visibility of features is an important feature in itself.

There's also mention of the renewed effort to bring the documentation and tutorials offered for the framework up to date with the latest stable release - version 0.6.]]> Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:19:55 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4994 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4994 AJ Tarachanowicz has written in about the latest updates that have been made over at the Seagull project - a move up to the first Release Candidate for version 0.6 of the framework.

After a 2 week sprint to the finish line, I'm pleased to announce the first release candidate for the 0.6 series of Seagull framework project is now available for download . There's been a lot of improvements implemented under the hood, but the most noticeable change is the completely redesigned admin user interface by Julien Casanova. Curious to try before you 'buy', checkout the demo at http://demo.seagullproject.org (config edits disabled). Although we have maintained our 1 release per month policy for most of the project's life, the last stable release was back in November 2005, and that was from the 0.4 series which started way back in the beginning of 2005.

Other improvements that he's notes you'll find in this release are:

• workflow and usability vastly improved with the sleek new admin GUI
• the Translation2 package is now fully integrated
• internationalised GUI strings
• navigation management vastly improved
• subtrees of navigation for each role of user in the system
• navigation types extended to include external links
• full URI aliasing support with javascript generation of search engine friendly URIs
• and much, much more...

If you haven't tried Seagull yet, now is a good time to check it out. The 0.6 series will be supported and improved throughout the coming months after which we're aiming for the 1.0 release. As the project's goals for feature completeness are now almost fully realised, there will be 1 final development cycle before we release 1.0 which we anticipate will happen in mid 2006. If you want to get in touch with the development team you can find us on #seagull, and for all bugs/feature requests please us. ]]> Wed, 15 Mar 2006 07:17:51 -0600