In this new post to his blog today, Matthew Weier O'Phinney mentions the death of PHP4 and (the main focus) gives a preview of what's to come in the next version of the Zend Framework (1.6.0).

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

As announced on the PHP.net site today, the first alpha version of the much-anticipated PHP 5.3 has been released - PHP 5.3 alpha 1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

Among the list of new features/improvements are things like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions, closures, support for mysqlnd and removal of support for pre-Windows 2000 systems. For more information on when the full stable version will his the web, check out the release plan.

The Internet Super Hero blog has posted about a preview release of the PDO_MYSQLND and a connector for MySQL to Open Office that have both been announced at this year's MySQL Conference.

The post explains what each of the technologies are for and where they fit in most development. The PDO_MYSQLND functionality is a direct connection for the PDO libraries to connect to MySQL using the native driver.

PDO_MYSQLND inherits all benefits of the MySQL native driver for PHP. In addition to the shared advantages you get the first PDO driver for MySQL developed by Sun/MySQL!

As the Zend Developer Zone points out, the preview release for the next stable version of the Zend Framework has been posted - ZF 1.5.0 Preview.

This release showcases features that will be introduced in the final 1.5 release. The intent of this release is to give our users access to the latest features in Zend Framework and to improve the overall quality of the production release through the feedback we receive.

Some of the new feature in this upcoming release include:

• New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
• Infocard, OpenID, and LDAP authentication adapters
• Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
• New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts

It also adds functionality to currently existing features and fixes several bugs in the process.

Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.

Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.

He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.

As Tim Koschuetzki points out, a preliminary version of the manual for the upcoming CakePHP 1.2 release has been posted:

This version of the manual is very much a work in progress. It is being provided as a help, not an official reference, until CakePHP 1.2 reaches a final release state. While we feel this is a great start, please realize that the information provided here may be incorrect or incomplete.

There's quite a bit there already including documentation for new functionality like the config classes and URL extensions.

Well, the official announcement has been made and the Zend Developer Zone has the scoop on the latest release of the Zend Framework - Preview Release 0.6.0.

This represents a watershed for Zend Framework: we have passed the halfway point. We decided to advance the version number more than the customary "one-tenth" increment.

We are at a phase in which we are focused on finishing the components of the product. As we are approaching a state of feature-completeness, a Beta Release, and then the General Release of version 1.0, we have created a more precise roadmap for the scope and schedule of upcoming preview releases of Zend Framework.

Updates in this edition include:

• Lucene-compatible search engine query language
• Improved Session-handling design
• Improved XmlRpc client and server
• Emerging components for I18N, Getopt, Mail folders, and others.
• Solutions for 126 bugs and feature enhancements, recorded in our issue tracker.

You can read up about all this and more on the Zend Framework Wiki home page.

You can also check out some other comments from Andi Gutmans (of Zend) over on his blog.

On Alexander Netkachev's blog today, there's a walk-through of a light and easy method for getting PHP and Apache up and running. It makes use of the Installer Technical Preview utility to make live simpler.

I created the installer, which primary goal is to provide the developer with command-line tools for basic Apache/PHP/MySQL management tasks.

This a preview version of AMP installer and configurator. Although, it is very far from being a real time-proven and tested installation method, with your help and effort we can make it better.

There's a link for the download and a brief How-To on using the package to get things up and running quickly. There's also two things on the To-Do list for upcoming versions - installers for various other databases and support for automatic installation of modern PHP applications (like WordPress, phpbb, etc).

The Zend Developer Zone as an update posted for the entire Zend Framework community with some details about the upcoming months and milestones.

Zend Framework has been picking up its pace of development recently. Many great improvements are coming soon in areas such as MVC, Acl, Authentication, Session handling, Search engine, and Gdata. There is also some great work in progress for Locale, Date, and others.

Other updates mentioned include a mid-December release date for a new Preview Release, a wiki page to show future release dates, a mention that the ZF is free software, and that the document translation section of the team is still (as always) in need of help. If you feel like getting in on the action, check out this page on the ZF wiki for more details.

The Zend Framework team has officially released for download the latest version of the Framework - Preview Release 0.2.0.

The Zend Framework community has released the 0.2.0 Preview Release. This release contains many important enhancements and new features:

• New MVC implementation
• New HTTP request and response objects make it easy to automate unit testing for web apps without a web server, and also make it possible to use MVC for command-line and PHP-GTK application development
• Enhanced pure PHP Lucene-compatible search engine component
• New Mysqli DB adapter
• New JSON server
• New REST client and server
• New XmlRpc client and server
• New Acl component
• New Session component
• New Web Services clients for Delicious and Audioscrobbler
• New Registry component
• Significant improvements to many other components

You can download this latest release directly from the Zend Framework site.