In a new post to his blog Andi Gutmans mentions how the Zend Framework was "well represented" in this year's SourceForge Awards.

The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento is a very popular eCommerce application that makes setting up an online shop quick and easy. It's well designed and has been nominates to several community spots like "Best Project for the Enterprise" and "Most Likely to Change the World".

Time 2.0 is focused on intranet collaboration and is a rewrite of the eGroupWare project (a collaboration suite allowing for instant access of any data from just about anywhere there's an internet connection).

You can cast your vote for these and other great community projects by logging in to SourceForge and selecting your favorites from the lists.

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.

Vinu Thomas has proposed a replacement for the usual var_dump or print_r sort of debugging developers tend to do - Krumo.

To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable [...] it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

It also supports output of other data in a "pretty format" like backtraces, included files and a listing of all constants. You can check out a demo of it in action here.

On his blog, Vinu Thomas has posted a guide to installing the Java bridge for PHP on an Ubuntu system:

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.

As mentioned by the php|architect website, the results are in for the Community Awards competition SourceForge was hosting for the year and two PHP-based projects made the list - phpBB and phpMyAdmin.

The Community Choice Awards are over! The SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards provided you an opportunity to recognize projects that stand taller than the rest. Everybody got to vote, and everybody’s vote counted equally. The winning projects, each with superlative quality, productivity, and ingenuity, represent the cream of the crop on SourceForge.net.

phpBB made the cut in the "Best Project for Communications" category and phpMyAdmin won in the "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins". Congratulations to both projects on your achievement!

The phpDocumentor project has announced the release of their latest version (a stable!) - phpDocumentor 1.4.0 - on their site today:

The PhpDocumentor team would like to announce the release of PhpDocumentor version 1.4.0 through SourceForge and pear.php.net. This is the first stable feature release since 2006.

This new release adds in functionality for new tags for "magic" properties and methods, some new runtime options (like ignoresymlinks and undocumentedelements) and puts a new memory_limit option on the ini file to help keep it more under control.

You can grab the latest download either through a "pear upgrade" or directly from the project's SourceForge site. Their latest post also includes the complete Changelog for more details on the updates.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a great list of applications that are currently creating to use the Zend Framework to power the application:

Recently an email was sent to the Zend Framework General List that mentioned the fact that there are now several projects on SourceForge based on the Zend Framework. There are actually 7,187 projects if you just search for Zend Framework but if you put search for Zend Framework in quotes, we get down to the 17 we really want. Here is a rundown of most of them.

Included in the list are applications like:

• phpYabs
• Orca
• OpenBay PHP Auction
• Octane Project

The Zend Developer Zone has a nwe post that announces the release of the first version of an API created to interface your PHP scripts with the Website Payments Pro API from Paypal - phpPaypalPro.

It is a framework developed in PHP5 that integrates easily with the Website Payments Pro API from Paypal. Currently it supports 4 major operations available from the Website Payments Pro SOAP 1.1 API. It has taken advantage of the built-in SOAP extension available natively in PHP5 to generate the requests and interprets the responses to and from the Website Payments Pro SOAP-based web service.

Current operations supported include: DoDirectPayment, SetExpressCheckout, GetExpressCheckoutDetails and DoExpressCheckoutPayment and you can get more information about other functionality from the project's documentation. Be sure to check out the sample script and the full SourceForge page for even more Paypal interface goodness.

Pádraic Brady, developer of the (work in progress) PHP-based strategy game Astrum Futura has posted today with the results of his look at a ranking of current PHP-based games and their popularity.

Sometimes I find it useful when measuring what's being downloaded in terms of open source PHP games to look at the top 10 rankings on Sourceforge for each gaming category. I say sometimes, because it tends to be fairly unreliable and doesn't really reflect real usage online.

Games on his list include Solar Imperium, Alien Assault Traders, PHP RISK and number one on the list - phpDiplomacy. Each item on the list includes the Sourceforge ranking against all other projects.

Torrent lovers everywhere can rejoice and pick up a new way to gather their favorite social sharing files - TorrentVolve. The TorrentVolve project is:

a cross-platform PHP-driven web-based BitTorrent client. It focuses on speed and reliability, while also providing a full feature set. It includes a user management system, a Torrent file manager, and a configurable Torrent downloader.

The project is still in beta but shows promise as a future staple in web-based torrent file gathering. They mention a few bug fixes and some new features (archive viewing, adding ETA & peer to the display, enabling/disabling automatic page refreshing).

You can get full details and the latest download of this package from their SourceForge page.