Justin Carmony has submitted a post from his blog today that looks at to of the major PHP IDEs - Zend Studio 6 and Eclipse PDT - and compares them on features and functionality.

I've been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I've been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

He compares their ease of installation, how easy they make it to refactor your code, debuggers included, the editor environment itself and, of course, the integration with Zend Platform/Zend Framework.

In this new post to the symfony blog today Fabien talks about some of the "small things" that help to make this latest version of the framework (1.2) even better.

As for every symfony version, we try to simplify the API and make it more intuitive and powerful. Here are some examples that you will soon enjoy in symfony 1.2.

There's four included in the post (and many more in the framework):

• Application name in CLI tasks
• Native PUT and DELETE support from the browser
• Shortcuts in the response
• sfValidatorSchemaCompare validator

On his CodeUtopia blog Jani Hartikainen gives an inside look at a feature of Doctrine, nested sets.

The Doctrine library comes with a feature called nested set, which makes saving trees in a database easy. However, it's quite easy to accidentally cause a lot of extra unneeded queries if not being careful. Here are some pointers to keep in mind while working with the nested set, and some example queries to make understanding it easier.

He gives an example, showing how to get rows from the database - parent and child - and some optimization tips to keep things light. There's also some pros and cons included for doing it either way (the standard fetching or using the more optimized versions).

On the Ibuildings blogs, there's a new post from Stefan Koopmanschap taking a look at the latest major release of the Symfony PHP framework (v1.1) and some of the functionality it includes.

The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.

He looks at the new architecture of the framework, how it now handles forms, the improvements to the plugin system and the (partial) integration of the Propel ORM layer for accessing databases. The full listing of updates can be found here.

As was previously mentioned by Christopher Jones, the PHP 5.3 branch is now under a feature freeze. Lukas Smith has posted a few more details about the upcoming release.

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less.

New features will have to go through either him or Johannes to be included and they are doing their best to get the alpha 1 release of this new version out by July 31st.

Lukas is also trying a more unconventional approach to bug fixes to try to get the major ones knocked out first - posting them as a comment to this blog post. So far, no comments on bugs have been added, but there are a good number to get through. To help narrow it down he's also put out a plea to developers out there to help validate current bugs to potentially knock off a few of the ones that can be marked bogus.

In a new blog post Christopher Jones mentions the feature freeze that's happened for the PHP 5.3 series including the Oracle support through the OCI8 extension.

The volume of commits has recently increased in anticipation of today's feature freeze deadline. I expect the Alpha release time frame will also see high activity. Eventually, increased tightening of criteria for patch acceptance will bring us to Beta and then Production releases.

Features included in this most recent extension version include an allowance for external authentication, a change to let Reflection correctly show function/method arguments, an increase on the oci8.default_prefetch setting and correctly defining the SQLT_BDOUBLE and SQLT_BFLOAT constants.

Keep an eye out for a release on PECL with these new updates soon.

AS Evan Sims mentions on his blog today, Automattic has released a version of WordPress for the iPhone (a client to connect to your remote blogging system).

There are a least a half dozen plugins for creating a more hospitable environment for managing your content on the iPhone, but quite honestly the quality of the ones I'd tried left a lot to be desired.

He noes that the application is "polished, official and completely native" and includes features that allow you to take a picture with the phone's camera and embed it directly into the post you're writing. Check out the sample video of it in action on an iPhone. You can download it from the App Store for free.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted an announcement that the latest Release Candidate for the CakePHP has been released (another step closer to 1.2) - version 1.2RC1.

Sorry about the long delay. But CakePHP 1.2 RC1 is out and as sweet as it can be.

Updates in this release include over eight hundred commits, one hundred plus bug fixes and lots of new security features and additional functionality. Check out the Changelog for the updates or just grab your own Cake from the downloads section.

Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

If you're a CakePHP user and have been frustrated by how this "bake" functionality doesn't allow for more than one validation rule on a given field, check out the new post on the SaniSoft blog (from Amit Badkas):

This is not much of a problem if you have only a few models but when you start to work on several dozen models in a project it becomes very tedious to open each and every model file to make changes.

The result of his frustration has come out in the form of a patch as a part of a new ticket in the CakePHP request submission process.