The Zend Developer Zone has posted the announcement about the release of the latest version of the Zend's rapid application development framework - Zend Framework 1.6.

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.

Paul Reinheimer has a suggestion on how to improve the PHP manual to be an even better resource - enhancing the "see also".

Something I'd like to see in PHP is a little more in the See Also section. They're pretty good, but it's not quite as spider-web like as I'd like. For example, yesterday I added a few links from md5() and sha1() to hash(). Lot of people know about md5() and sha1() within PHP, but I find hash() is rather unknown overall, which is a pity as it exposes a tone of different hashing algorithms.

You can see an example of his updates in the md5 manual page linking it to sha1_file, crc32, sha1 and the hash functions.

In this new post, Chris Hartjes takes a look at something that is one of the banes of most programmers' existence - documentation. In it he wonders what should really be considered documentation and the importance of it.

As a committed user of open source technologies, the difference between me using something and not using something is the documentation. Is there documentation for it? Is it easy to find? Does it answer my questions? Is there someone I can call an idiot if I disagree with the level of documentation? These are all very important questions.

He uses the illustration of the documentation of the CakePHP framework that's helpful, but only really after you learn how to use the framework in the first place. He mentions people on both sides of the fence - those that love the framework and love the documentation and those that moved on to something simpler because they just couldn't get it.

He also mentions the variety of sources that can provide "documentation" for the framework when you're getting a bit stuck - everything from blogs to The Bakery to a different sort of documentation, unit test.

On the Ibuildings blog today Mikko Koppanen talks a bit about Open Source software projects and things that can help to make them successful.

An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right?

He recommends a team infrastructure growth as the application grows and the importance of documentation and maintenance after the project has been launched.

In his "newbie findings" posted to his blog today, David Goodwin recounts his efforts to get SOAP an XML-RPC up and working with his PHP5 project and the wealth of documentation he found.

I'm no great expert on the inner workings of these protocols....there are probably secret manuals on SOAP/XmlRpc etc I/we failed to read somewhere. This is just a documentation of what I/we as "newbies" found ...

Resources in the list include things like the SCA SDO module from PECL, some examples of its usage, where it is used, what kind of transport layer the protocol allows and some of the functionality that the Zend Framework allows (including some sample code for a simple server and client).

Fred Wu recently posted some of his thoughts on using the Zend Framework as a developer in other frameworks looking to expand his knowledge.

When Zend Framework was first announced, the developers have promised us one thing: extreme simplicity. I was 'extremely' excited, but it turned out that it wasn't the case. Ironically, Zend Framework is the most difficult one I have come crossed so far. I mean, as complicated as Symfony is, it has brilliant documentation and an active community to back it up.

He also comments on the level of documentation the framework has ("the documentation is often outdated, sometimes inaccurate"), the Zend_Search_Lucene component, some of what he thinks are missing components that should be in a 1.5 release, and a last jab at the naming conventions.

Several updates have been made to the documentation for the PHP-GTK project including a version of the manual.

From Leon Pegg on the PHP-GTK Community site:

I have been working on the php-gtk documentation the last few weeks. I finally have an updated version of the manual. Unfortunately its not on the main site gtk.php.net, so I have uploaded it here: leonpegg.com/php-gtk-doc

The manual includes tutorials, the actual reference guide and an appendix of details on terms/other information.

According to this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, its parent company, Zend, has launched their Zend Product Online Documentation Center:

You know when you reach that point when you just don't remember where to configure your Zend Platform Events, how to set up your Tunneling, or what that Zend Core extension does? Well the documentation team at Zend have come up with a way to make all Zend product documentation as easily available as possible, so you can all benefit from our wisdom and experience.

The documentation center is a resource for all things Zendy - information on their products made searchable and easy to browse.

Michael Kimsal has posted his opinion on why PDO, the database interface layer for PHP, sucks.

Every so often I try to use PDO under PHP5, and every time I run in to basic functionality problems with no ability to find out what's going on under the hood.

He includes a few comments supporting his statement including an issue where a prepare() call didn't work, his frustration with not being able to see what's "under the hood" and the lack of documentation to help with these sorts of issues.

Chris Hartjes has posted about a new resource that he "cannot stop recommending people to use [it] when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems" - the CakePHP Cookbook.

With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It's a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there.

With the wiki in place, anyone can add to the communal CakePHP wisdom (or correct where others might have strayed) to make it a bigger and better resource for the whole range of CakePHP developers.