As a quick reminder, there's still time to register for Zend's latest Webinar event - Zend Framework Database Access happening today at 9am PDT:

One of the core features of the Zend Framework is its database access component. The DB component is designed with a "keep it simple" principle, giving access to advanced data access features, balanced with database implementation abstraction, extreme simplicity, and ease of use. Another goal of the DB component is to encourage good practices and reduce performance and security flaws. Zend's Bill Karwin will give an overview of the capabilities of the Zend DB component, and show several examples of using it in PHP 5 for tasks.

Topics covered include different types of database connections, running queries, checking the performance stats of the execution and building tables similar to ActiveRecord.

Click here to sign up for the event.

According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.

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.