According to this post on the PHP-GTK Community site, the latest version of the software, PHP-GTK 2.0.1, has been released.

This release, named you knew this was coming, adds full support for GtkBuilder and tooltips; in addition to a slew of bug fixes and overrides. [...] Coming up next: Akshat Gupta, our student for the Google Summer of Code program this year, will be working on cairo support for PHP-GTK.

The post also lists the changes to the packages included (and excluded) with this new release.

Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has posted an update on the status of the Zend Framework for the month of May:

This [May 15th maintenance release] reinforces our commitment to high quality and we will continue to release periodic mini releases on an as needed basis. [...] Not only is the Zend Framework user base growing rapidly but we are also seeing a sharp rise in adoption of ZF in business-critical commercial applications.

He mentions several major sites moving to use the framework like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IGN Entertainment as well as the update they've made to the contribution process to allow for easier submission and review.

Michael Kimsal has posted about the release of a new book from php|architect publishing, PHP Architect's Guide to Programming with Magento. Coincidently, one of the authors is also his brother Mark Kimsal.

I'm really excited for him, as I know he put a lot of work over the past several months learning Magento and writing the book. The biggest challenege was dealing with the underlying architecture changes that the Magento team applied in various versions leading up to (and including after!) the 1.0 release.

It's hard to hit a moving target like that, but as Michael mentions, the book and its authors did a great job of it.

The book as been officially released and can be purchased on the php|architect website in either a Print+PDF ($34.99 CAD) or just PDF ($29.99 CAD).

Jordi Boggiano has blogged about a new PHP5 templating engine called Dwoo that's just been released for download.

Early this year I wanted to rebuild my template engine to have something stronger to work with, so I started thinking about it and then asked myself why I didn't use one of the available engines out there. The fact is that - and I guess I will lose many of my few readers here - I am not fond of using php itself as a template engine (with Savant or similar).

Features of the templating engine include a striking similarity to Smarty's methods, the fact that its code is scope aware, it has template inheritance and comes with a plugin system that can be extended as you see fit.

You can get complete information about the engine from the Dwoo homepage.

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.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted an announcement to the Debuggable blog about the upcoming stable release of the next major version of the CakePHP framework, version 1.2.

The CakePHP team is gearing up to finally push out a stable 1.2 release! If you are following the trac timeline you can see that everybody is putting in huge amounts of work to fix bugs and get everything stable.

He suggests a few ways to get involved in helping to push this release out the door like writing test cases, showing how to replicate bugs and help out the documentation team with their efforts to keep the manual up to date.

The Zend Developer Zone has come across an interesting face about the SourceForge website - it uses the Zend Framework to add OpenID functionality to its pages.

According to the press release from SF about their OpenID support:

OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we're happy to be jumping into it. it's bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. [...] We've spent the past couple weeks on it - integrating the Zend Framework OpenID component into our site code. we like the framework as a whole and I personally hope to use more of it in the future.

There might be a few kinks in the process, so if you're seeing issues with your OpenID working on their site, check out the FAQ they've posted to help.

Silvan Muhlemann has posted about the unit testing that tillate.com does for their releases - the whole process from start to finish.

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I'd like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests.

He talks about their choice of SimpleTest, their test monitoring, CruiseControl and their "if it doesn't pass, you can't release it" mentality to keep their site as bug free as possible.

The Internet Super Hero blog has announced the release of the latest alpha version of the mysql native driver for PDO - version 1.0.2-alpha (PDO_MYSQLND):

I am glad to announce the availability of the first alpha version of PDO_MYSQLND. PDO_MYSQLND is a PHP PDO driver for MySQL based on the MySQL native driver. PDO_MYSQLND 1.0.2-alpha is available for download on http://downloads.mysql.com/forge/pdo_mysqlnd_preview.

Updates include fixes for return values, patches for memory leaks, more code coverage and some "very promising results" running on a set of dedicated testing machines.

The PHP development team has released the latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series today - version 5.2.6:

This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security updates include prevention of a buffer overflow in FastCGI mode, an integer overflow in printf, correction for a safe_mode bypass method in cURL and the bundling of PCRE 7.6 to update the regular expression functionality of the language.

You can grab this latest release from the downloads page on PHP.net (or your favorite mirror) - both the source and the Windows binaries.