Paul Jones is happy to announce that the Solar PHP framework he develops on has made it to the next major stage in its development - Solar 1.0.0 alpha 1 release.

After more months of breaks, changes, additions, and refactoring, I’m (finallly) at the point where I’m ready to call the Solar framework for PHP 5 feature-complete. The first of this feature-complete series is the new Solar-1.0.0alpha1 release as of Sunday, 11 Nov, 2007. We now have at least 80% of everything you would need to build web-based and cli-based applications. This is a big milestone for the project.

Some of the "highlights" of this new release he mentions include:

• The new Solar_Controller_Console and Solar_Controller_Command classes are analagous to front and page controllers, respectively, for the command line.
• The new Solar_Filter class combines validating and sanitizing.
• We’ve moved a lot of the core functions of the Solar arch-class to their own static classes
• Lots of changes in the Solar_Sql package related to database portability

There's also a new ORM system he mentions - mainly the major addition of Solar_Sql_Model (and its friends). Check out the community wiki for the new functionality to get started.