Well, in case you haven't already seen the news - over on PHP.net this morning, there's a note about the Initial Alpha Release of PHP w/ the Zend Engine 2 being made available to the public. It is based on the current PHP 4 CVS (4.3.0-dev) and includes the new scripting engine which greatly improves the object model, adds exception handling and provides a much better infrastructure for the integration of external technologies like Java or .NET. Sounds like fun to me....but just remember - this is an alpha version of this and in no way, shape, or form should it be put into production. And, for you Windows folks, yes, they do have the binary availible.

There's two new things from Zend this morning - first off, they have this week's PHP Weekly Summary posted with details on a possible RDF extension, an operators patch, and the future of PHP. That last bit is the interesting part, and the answer they give is a good one. They sum it up with their (the developers) vision of where PHP is headed in the years to come.
Also from Zend today, they have a new Tricks of the Trade titled Intelligent CMS: Web Form Best Practices. Content management systems are almost a necessity in today's world - allowing anyone that needs to, without knowing how HTML works or anything, to update a website with current information. In this article they give you some good tips to use on your CMS to make it work the best and it's smoothest for all of your users. My personal favorite: Never, ever, trust the user.

And, for the voyeur in all of us, there's plenty of pictures from LinuxTag this year linked to from everywhere. (For those out there that don't know what this event is - it's a meeting of people who love Open Source software and everything it stands for. And it's not just a certain kind of OSS author, either. Every kind of OSS developer is welcome. See linuxtag.org for more info.)