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.

• PHP 5.2.5 is now the most popular PHP version, ahead of 4.4.8
• PHP 5 reaches 36.60% of PHP market share
• Still a lot of migrations toward 5.2.5 and 4.4.8

You can check out the details on these and other statistics (like PHP usage by country and version) the complete monthly stats and the evolution stats. Oh, and don't forget - Damien and crew are the ones supplying the latest edition of the elePHPants to the PHP community!

Springloops is a nice code management service recently came into focus. It helps you to manage the code base of your application, monitor the commit and deploy the final version easily to another server. So if you are wondering how to build such a system and how it actually works, this article is for you.

He breaks it down into the six main topics (as he sees it) that are the core parts of the system - things like payment gateways, setting up subversion and making it user friendly. He goes through each topic, explaining its place in the application and providing some links to resources to help you set it up (or at least learn more about it).

My favorite PHP framework just got a new release, adding several new components and fixing 30-ish bugs. The bundled JavaScript libs (Prototype / script.aculo.us) have also been upgraded, so that should help lots of people struggling with the old versions.

You can download the framework from its website and, if you're new to it, check out the tutorial to get you started. Prado is a free PHP5-based rapid application development framework that doesn't go with the usual MVC format of most frameworks. It opts instead for "logic be stored in classes and presentation in templates".

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

With 1.5, everything that makes the framework attractive has quite simply been boosted. We now have a fully comprehensive complex view aggregation/templating system to play with, we have a forms component, translations are integrated as view helpers. Just rattling off several new features is enough to pull together just how comprehensive and cohesive the framework has become over it's 1.0 predecessor. It's that significant.

He talks about things like Zend_Layout and additions to Zend_Form as well as the community around the framework and some of the places that the framework and its process are still lacking a bit.

After a long development and QA cycle, we are proud to release version 2.0 of PHP-GTK. This release, named leap day special, marks PHP-GTK 2 as stable and comes with support for GTK+ versions 2.6 through 2.12. Although support for more recent versions than 2.8 is not 100% complete, we hope to cover as much of the API as possible in upcoming releases.

Several bloggers are also happy about the news including Elizabeth Smith and the PHP-GTK Community site

You can grab this latest download download page on the official PHP-GTK site (and check out the links to some of the great PHP-GTK resources out there too).

The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.

Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.

Find out more on the Drupal homepage.

If you purchase a cheap hosting account with many of the major web hosts around today, chances are they will be running PHP 4. The problem for web hosts is this: the PHP community may have moved on from version 4, but a lot of the code out there hasn't.

He recommends one solution that several hosting providers are starting to gravitate towards - offering both to their customers and allowing them to switch between them (via something like cPanel).

EllisLab is proud to announce the release of CodeIgniter 1.6, our open source web application framework. The release marks a new turn in the development of the framework, and has received considerable attention from both EllisLab developers and the community.

There's lots of new features in this new release including a Database Forge class, improvements to their Active Record implementation, an extendable Model class, and the addition of extendable Helpers.

You can find out more about the framework on the project's homepage or just head straight to the downloads section and grab the latest updates.