The latest official release announcement for the Zend Framework has been posted to the Zend Developer Zone today - version 0.8.0 has been finalized and made available for download.

We're pleased to announce Zend Framework Preview Release 0.8.0. Download it from http://framework.zend.com/.This preview release contains many improvements across virtually the entire set of components in Zend Framework. It's hard to categorize this release as focused on one component or another, because so much great new functionality has been added.

Updates include several packages being moved from the incubator to the core including Zend_Auth, Zend_Filter, Zend_Rest_Client, and Zend_Validate. Improved items include the Zend_Db compontent and the MVC modular application support. Check out this announcement for more details on updates and additions.

The next milestone is Zend Framework Beta 0.9.0, on approximately March 15. This will be our first Beta release. The objective of the Beta is to be feature complete with respect to the components we will include in Zend Framework 1.0. Any component that is still in the incubator in ZF 0.9.0 will probably not be released in ZF 1.0, but such components may appear in future releases after 1.0.