Helgi has posted about an update to the next alpha release of PEAR to remove support for certain versions of PHP:

For the next alpha release of PEAR that will happen in 2 - 4 weeks we'll have a min dep of PHP 4.4 and 5.1.6, so basically excluding 5.0.0 - 5.1.5 Now why am I going to do that?

This pushes more people up from the PHP 4.3.x series (to the 4.4.x that was the last PHP4 release) and up to a more recent PHP5 version for the future. Eventually, PHP4 support will be dropped all together, but for now there's a bit of a hold out.

Christopher Jones mentions the release of the latest OCI8 component for PHP - version 1.3.4 stable.

OCI 1.3.4, with the changes I mentioned in my last post, is now available on PECL: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8.

He also mentions the work on the Windows version of the extension that he's been up to with the plan to make two OCI8 DLL releases for the future - one using 10g libraries and the other using 11g.

As Vinu Thomas has noted, the latest stable version of the WordPress blogging software has been released - WordPress 2.6.

From the Twitter feed of Matt Mullenweg:

I'm happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 "Tyner," named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

You can check out some of the new functionality in the video included in Vinu's post and you can grab this latest download from the main WordPress website.

Christopher Jones has noted that the latest version of the OCI8 drivers for PHP (in the PECL extension) have been pushed to the current stable package.

HP's OCI8 1.3.3 has support for Oracle's DRCP connection pooling and Fast Application Notification technologies giving it improved scalability and high availability. Overall, the re-architecture of the connection code is more stable. It fixes some obscure edge case issues and lets it handle re-started DB's better. Basic functionality is unchanged.

You can find out more about the package and download this latest edition from its PECL page or check out the whitepaper they recent;y wrote up about PHP and Oracle scalability.

Joakim has let us know about the recent updates that have been made to the WebGrind web-based frontend for XDebug.

Webgrind, the web frontend to Xdebug has been updated to version 0.7 with a few new features like: Support for directly loading a report through hash in url, Visual breakdowns of internal, class and procedural functions and calls to include/require and Version checking.

This new version (0.7) can be downloaded directly from its Google Code page.

With the recent stir caused by the new iPhone, it's only natural that developers are looking for easy ways to make their sites as compatible as possible with the mobile platform. The Symfony project has posted a guide to helping you make your apps optimized for mobile use.

symfony 1.1 introduces native support for different formats and mime-types. This means that the same model and controller can have different templates based on the requested format. The default format is still HTML but symfony supports several other formats out of the box as defined in the factories.yml file.

Using this system, it's easy to add new output formats by adding to the default layouts the framework comes equipped with. The Content-Type can be changed and layouts can be disabled as needed. This lets you make a custom definition just for use with the iPhone without a lot of hassle.

They also include an example of how to make one of these optimized layouts, including some iPhone "screenshots" of the resulting pages.

On TheServerSide.com (a Java community) there's a post about the latest release of the Netbeans software (version 6.1) and how they've integrated more PHP-ness into it.

The NetBeans 6.1 release is mostly a release of the candidate announced a few weeks ago - definitely a lot of changes in the overall release, with a heavy focus on web services and re-integration of some of the JSF/JPA tooling. However, the PHP platform - a 16MB or so download that provides a PHP-targeted IDE based on Java - is .. interesting.

Comments on the post talk a lot about the other language support for the IDE with only a few mentioning the PHP support (though the ones that do show promising results).

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post about the release of the latest version of the NetBeans IDE, 6.1.

Feature-for-feature, Eclipse and NetBeans are well matched. In fact, because they are both extensible, any feature gaps between the two can be filled in with third-party plug-ins. Eclipse and Netbeans are rapidly approaching the capabilities of commercial offerings. Most developers won't need more than what these two excellent development platforms provide.

A (very) brief list of the features of the two is also included, their similarities including SVN support and syntax checking.

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.

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.