The day has finally arrived for the CodeIgniter fans out there - EllisLab has officially released CodeIgniter 2.0.0 in two versions - the Core and Reactor branches.

Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter Reactor Engineers are proud to announce the first official release of CodeIgniter 2.0.0, which is being released in two flavors.

The "Core" version will be the branch that EllisLab uses for their internal applications and will be a bit slower moving. The "Reactor" branch, however, is more community-powered and headed up by a set of Engineers that will guide the framework and work to make it its best. Also mentioned as new in the post are the upcoming ability for users to contribute directly to the user guide, the creation of a standardized Authentication library and a more object-like model setup. If you're interested in the Reactor branch and want to try it out or contribute, head over to the bitbucket account for the project.

Kenny Katzgrau has written up a post about some of the things going on with EllisLab, CodeIgniter and the CodeIgniter Reactor project from the perspective of one of the selected Engineers to head it up.

A couple of weeks ago, Derek Jones of EllisLabs announced that the CodeIgniter Core would officially be branched so a community-driven version of the framework could be created. This new branch will be called CodeIgniter Reactor. The plan, which was clarified today, is focused on allowing a select group of CI engineers to actively commit new features to the codebase, while taking feature requests via a uservoice forum. Over time, any proven, time-tested features in Reactor will be merged into the Core.

He touches on things like the Kohana framework, why he thinks the CodeIgniter community is still so strong, what he sees happening with the Reactor project and his own word to the skeptics.

The CodeIgniter project (from EllisLab) has posted the latest community efforts they've been making to try to advance not only the framework but the CodeIgniter community as well. They've introduced three new things - CodeIgniter Reactor, Core and UserVoice.

EllisLab, Inc. is formally announcing CodeIgniter Reactor, a community driven branch of CodeIgniter that will enable faster adoption of the best community submitted code to the CodeIgniter open source PHP framework. CodeIgniter Reactor will be available the first quarter of 2011. A second branch, CodeIgniter Core, will be maintained by EllisLab and incorporate the best of Reactor at a slower, more enterprise-friendly pace.

The Reactor branch will be the one headed up by the six engineers they selected from the CI community. EllisLab has handed this branch off into their capable hands. The Core branch will remain as-is and will be updated as EllisLab sees the need for some of their products. The UserVoice system has been set up to allow other developers a voice in what they think needs to be included in the next versions of the framework. If you're interested in contributing, you can find that here.

A new episode of the CodeIgniter podcast has been released today talking about some of the recent happenings in the CodeIgniter community.

Phil, Derek and Kenny have a chat about the recent changes in CodeIgniter 2.0 (dropping PHP4 and others) and talk about the new CodeIgniter Community Branch.

Resources mentioned include Derick Allard's blog, the official information about the community branch, Ion Auth and a course schedule and booking system example. You can either download the mp3 of the episode or you can listen on the in-page player.

On CodeIgniter.com today there's a new blog post hoping to clear up any confusion about the Community Branch of the framework and the NDA that would be required for those developers on the project.

The confusion lies in the purpose of the NDA, and the scope of what it covers. The branch's development will not be under NDA, nor will discussions between the deputies and the community, how they receive code submissions, what they reveal to others about their own plans, and so on.

The NDA does, however, cover any discussions that might be had with the EllisLab group about the structure and guidelines concerning the development of the branch. It's not designed to keep the community out of the development process but rather to keep things about ElliLab's other products out of the larger flow of ideas.

On LWN.net there's a new article written up by Jonathan Corbet about the state of PHP6, what it was supposed to be and what it might be in the future.

Rightly or wrongly, many in our community see Perl 6 as the definitive example of vaporware. But what about PHP 6? This release was first discussed by the PHP core developers back in 2005. There have been books on the shelves purporting to cover PHP 6 since at least 2008. But, in March 2010, the PHP 6 release is not out - in fact, it is not even close to out. Recent events suggest that PHP 6 will not be released before 2011 - if, indeed, it is released at all.

He talks about features that were supposed to disappear in PHP6 (with some of them making their way into PHP 5.3) including the Unicode support the language needs more and more. He mentions how the development has stalled out a bit recently but has been spurred back to life when major decisions were made to get away from a PHP 5.4 branch and move back to PHP6.

Be sure to check out the great comments on the post from other PHP developers from all around the web.

If you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing to LWN for more great articles.

As announced on the Symfony project's blog today, they are officially announcing the last release of the 1.0 series in favor of the 1.4 releases.

The 27th of January is kind of an important date in mankind history. Of course, everybody know it is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the date of the invention of the light-bulb by Thomas Edison. To this list, the core team is proud to add the last release of the symfony 1.0 branch: symfony 1.0.22.

It's been three years since the first release in the 1.0.x series was made and a lot of progress has come along since then (including a few other branches) including over 163,000 lines of code, 22 stable releases and more than 300 plugins. You can grab the latest from their 1.4.x series (currently 1.4.1) from thier download page either as a package or as a checkout from their Subversion repository.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted about some major recent advancements with Symfony framework:

Great stuff is happening today! I would dare to say that to date, December 1 2009 is probably the most active and important day in the history of the symfony project! Three(!) new versions have been released, amongst which the first of the last branch of symfony 1, and a new book is available in the form of an online advent calendar and a print book.

The releases included a major bugfix release (1.2.10) and the two new branches - Symfony 1.3 and 1.4. You can find their advent calendar for this year here. Its different than in the last two years - it's not a project but more the usual collection of articles.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

The Symfony project has posted an announcement about the start of the official release process for the framework's latest branch - Symfony 1.1.

As the features for symfony 1.1 are quite finished now, it's time to move on and start the release process.

They've made two new branches in preparation to get things ready - one for the release itself and the other for the release's documentation. Users wanting to use the latest stable, still point to /branches/1.0. Those wanting to test this upcoming release, use /branches/1.1.