To make a long story short, Symfony now manages its releases through a time-based model. If you want to learn more about the Symfony release process, or about the first Symfony Long Term Support release, or about the release date for next version of Symfony, please take a minute to read the new process. You are also going to learn when we will start working on Symfony 3!

The full details also include a timeline they've projected for the upcoming 2.x versions of the framework, right up to the 3.0 release. The goal of the process is to provide transparency and predictability to the Symfony frmework's releases with 6 month releases and and open plan presented to the community up front.

Since its creation, more than 7 years ago, CakePHP has grown with a life of its own. Its main goal has always been to empower developers with tools that are both easy to learn and use, leverage great libraries requiring low documentation and low dependencies too. We've had several big releases along these years and an ever growing community. Being one of the most popular frameworks out there and probably the first one (!) we have also gotten a lot of criticism from the developer community in general. We have, though, accepted it and learnt from our mistakes to keep building the best PHP framework there is.

Some of the coming improvements include:

• Drop support for 5.2.x and support 5.4+ only
• Use traits were possible and makes sense
• Model layer rewrite
• Improve Router
• Improve bootstrapping process to allow more developer control and better performance

You can find more about the current features of the framework on it's main project site.

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place. [...] These are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important.

She talks about:

• The importance of fostering a good community around the project
• Providing good documentation (README in this case) for people new to the project
• Having a clear vision of the future of the project (roadmap)
• Dealing with the code contributed to the project - good and bad
• Having transparency with the contributors and anyone wanting to find out more about the project

Want to get involved? Check out Joind.in on github for more details and the source for the site.

We are now ready to release Symfony 2.0 final. As we have made some significant changes in the last couple of weeks, we are publishing another release candidate (RC5) today and we will wait for a week before releasing Symfony 2.0 final on Thursday 28th.

The upgrade to Symfony2 is just a few commands away and there's a large list of components that are set and will not be changed moving forward including the DependencyInjection, Finder, Locale, Routing and Validator.

Symfony 2.1 will be the first release with all the components with a public stable API. And for components that already have a public API in 2.0, 2.1 will be the occasion to add even more classes and methods to it.

The past few months have kept myself and my team quite busy, as we've turned our attentions from maintenance of the Zend Framework 1.X series to Zend Framework 2.0. I've been fielding questions regularly about ZF2 lately, and felt it was time to talk about the roadmap for ZF2, what we've done so far, and how the community can help.

Included in the roadmap for the upcoming version are things like easing the learning curve for new developers, improving the baseline performance of the framework, an effort to simplify things and to use PHP 5.3 to it's best capabilities.

You can see the full roadmap here.

I already posted some questions on the wiki, but I would like to expand my thoughts on the architectural changes from a testing and design point of views, that are what interest my readers. Here's a list of the guidelines that have the greatest impact.

The touches on a few topics - the unified constructor, ridding the framework of singletons, implementing a design by contract approach, namespacing, changes in the Zend_Session component and a few others.

After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.

Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.

Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.

Although not always visible due to the infrequent release of new framework packages, there has been a lot of progress in the past few months. More than 100 community members(!) have joined the effort by singing the CLA, and are contributing via proposals, comments, patches, code contributions or documentation improvements.

Now the Summer is over and everyone is back at work, we feel it's the right time to finish planning the 1.0 release. We believe that in order to make a successfull release and get closure on the various aspects, it makes most sense to break up the framework into a limited number of subject areas and form project teams around these areas instead of components.

The following is a list of such areas and the components we believe we should focus on for 1.0. As you can see, a large amount of the work has already been done, but we now have to focus on getting closure on them and tying up loose ends.

Some of the components they've listed fall under the categories of:

• Web & Web Services
• MVC & related
• Authentication & authorization
• Databases
• Documentation & translation

There is also a high-level look at what version 0.2 of the framework will contain and a return to the "post often" methodology they had before.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.