Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.

Both Lukas Smith and Michael Kimsal are talking about a new project started up by the PHP development group to help provide more information to the users (and other developers) of the PHP language - the PHP.net wiki.

Michael comments:

This has been a long time coming and I'm glad to see it in place. I hope it will continue to help open up the development process to a larger audience. [...] This is definitely a large step for the project and I hope it'll get traction and become one of the key tools used to drive PHP forward.

And Lukas talks more about the planning behind the project:

So things are moving forward. Thanks to Pierre who set up a dokuwiki on the libgd server (if you are unware libgd is now a subproject of php.net) and Hannes for setting up a new auth API against the master.php.net user database we have a wiki up and running on wiki.php.net. [...] I am quite happy that we managed to get this far.

You can check out the wiki yourself at wiki.php.net.

David Coallier has posted about the progress that's already being made in the PHP Project - a new wiki that's been installed.

The wiki is of course not opened to everyone in the world (as wikis are usually a source of big mess) but only to developers that have any type of CVS access on the cvs.php.net server.

One of the first orders of business is moving the TODO list out from its current location and into the wiki, making it simple for anyone to check out what the language developers will be working on in the future.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of this past week's visitor poll asking "Which Feature Is Not Suitable for phpDocumentor?"

Of the choices, the "None" option got the most votes (33.3% in fact) followed at a large margin by "Fully customizable output with Smarty-based templates" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source". The users have spoken and they think phpDocumentor is flexible enough to handle everything from outputting in HTML/PDF formats to having a web and command-line interface.

This week's poll question asks about something a little more common - which of the items in the list are your favorite PHP game (and yes, there's "All" and "None" options). Check it out and cast your vote today!

The O'Reilly site, ONLamp.com, has a new tutorial posted today - a look at how to simplify your PHP development with WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP).

WASP (Web Application Structure for PHP) is a three-tier framework built on PHP 5. Lately, more software engineers are moving from cumbersome "enterprise" languages such as Java and C# to languages such as Python and Ruby and PHP. With version 5, PHP has finally reached the point where these developers can feel at home in what used to be considered a hacker's language. By demonstrating that it is possible to create and use complicated, "enterprise-class" frameworks effectively in PHP 5, WASP will help more developers make the switch.

They look at working with WASP 1.1 to create a project (in this case, a ToDo list), build out its properties, setting up the model/view/controller structure for the site, and wrap it all up with the interface on top (and the interaction with the framework it needs). The article walks you through every step of the way, too, giving clear code examples and explaining what everything is doing...