In a new blog entry Lukas Smith notes that the latest alpha release, version 2, of the PHP 5.3 series is now available for download from the PHP QA website.

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.

In this new post to the symfony blog, there's an update on the framework's latest version, Propel integration and the addition of the sfDoctrinePlugin.

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.

Paul Reinheimer has posted about a contest in the making - a turn-based robot battle sort of game where PHP scripts compete against each other.

Just a quick announcement, in an effort to come up with a self scoring contest, I came up with the ridiculously simple concept of robots firing lasers at each other in a fictional arena. Each robot controlled by a different PHP script, and a central arena managing it all. It's basically a turn based game where your robots take turns for you.

You can check out more about the game and its rules over on the Web Bot Battle site. It defines how your bots should act and even has some examples for you to work from.

Chris Hartjes has blogged about the new CakePHP release that's on the horizon - version 1.2:

I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.

Christopher Jones has posted an announcement about the latest release of the PECL OCI8 package (version 1.3.2 Beta) hitting the streets:

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

Christopher Jones has posted to his Oracle blog today about the release of a new beta for the PECL Oracle (OCI8) drivers for PHP.

I've created a PECL OCI8 1.3.1 Beta bundle of the code with Connection Pooling support that I mentioned in http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/2008/01/31. You can get it from http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8. The README contains the details.

Of course, it's still in beta, so any testing and feedback is more than welcome. This bundle also includes several other "non-DRCP related bug fixes" including an issue that caused constant pinging for persistent connections.

Since he didn't come across any issues or bug reports, Richard Heyes has officially released his SMTP class for PHP5 as "out of public beta" and ready for production use.

I've not added any new features to the class; I've simply updated it to be, well, better. Plus it uses PHP5's object model better. It's really just an update, ie if you're using the old version and it works, then you have no real reason to update it.

You can check out the source here and an example of it in action here.

The CakePHP podcast, The Show, has released its latest episode - episode #6, "Babbling 'Bout Beta":

The Show is back! Garrett, Nate, and Jeff talk about the recent release of CakePHP 1.2 Beta. Don't miss this show as we broadcast from every timezone in America simultaneously.

The show was recorded back on January 5th, but you can still download the mp3 from it to listen to at your continence. You can also subscribe to their feed to get the latest information on the podcast and news about the latest shows.

Jacob Santos has posted a list of things that he both likes and dislikes about one of Zend's beta offerings - Zend Neon.

I've been using Zend Studio Neon for the past three weeks and I have to say, for something that is free (beta software) it is quite good. Compared to using VS 2005, Zend Studio Neon has its advantages, since Visual Studio doesn't handle PHP well. Zend Studio Neon also has areas that I didn't like.

His likes included the fact that it's not Eclipse (technically) and that it supports PHPUnit and PHPDocumentor out of the box. Dislikes included the fact that it might not be free in the future and that it lacks FTP support.

In a new post on the PHP 10.0 Blog, Stas mentions his posting of a beta version of the Internationalization extension for PHP.

I've posted the first beta of PHP Internationalization extension, bringing support for some ICU functions to PHP. Documentation can be read in PHP manual, and the downloads are available on PECL site.

His goal is to have it all ready and waiting (and included) for when PHP 5.3 is set to roll off the line. The extensions consists of four major parts that do the work for you - the collator, number formatter, normalizer and a locale component.