In this new post to his blog today, Matthew Weier O'Phinney mentions the death of PHP4 and (the main focus) gives a preview of what's to come in the next version of the Zend Framework (1.6.0).

I'm celebrating [the death of PHP4] with the second release candidate of Zend Framework 1.6.0, which should drop today. There are a ton of new features available that I'm really excited about. I'm not going to go into implementation details here, but instead catalogue some of the larger and more interesting changes that are part of the release.

He mentions the Dojo integration, updates to the unit testing infrastructure, captcha support in the Zend_Form component, Firebug support and included pagination functionality. You can grab this preview release from the downloads page on the Zend Framework website.

Vinu Thomas has posted about a PHP/GD CAPTCHA solution he's come across - Secureimage.

From the company's description:

Securimage is an open-source free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots. It can run on most any webserver as long as you have PHP installed, and GD support within PHP.

Features of the tool include simple addition and validation methods, the ability to make audible CAPTCHAs and True Type font support. You can download the software from the project's website.

DevShed has posted the next (and last) part of their series on image generation with PHP, creating a class to handle most of the work for you and implement the graphics functionality (GD) PHP has built in. This time, they take things a step further and use the class they've created so far to make CAPTCHA images for a site.

In this last article of the series I'm going to show you how to couple this class with a simple randomizer mechanism to implement a basic yet effective application that will be capable of outputting on the browser different random strings, which will be previously embedded into a predefined image stream.

They start with their previous version of the class and work off of it, extending its functionality to add a multi-call ability and to hook into a RandomGenerator class to create the string.

Gareth Heyes has posted about a new plugin he's created , spam protection for his WordPress blog - SpamBam.

The latest plugin uses my PHP/JS randomisation techniques to create a key and protect against spam. I've took this bold move to see what affect it has and if the blog spammers will get round it because it no longer uses javascript cookies.

His plugin includes features including a lack of cookie use, delay on spammers (slows spam scripts) and doesn't use CAPTCHAs. You can also check out this section on Gareth's blog for the latest on the plugin.

On the Venture Skills Blog, there's a new post that looks at one of the more recent advancements in keeping the spammers away from your blogs comments (one among many other uses) - re-captchas.

Commonly CAPTCHA is a visual image where the user is asked to type the word they see (or hear) however some provide a logic puzzle [...] Re-captcha works by asking the user for two words instead of the normal one, one word is known to the system and is the actual CAPTCHA the second is an unknown word, if the user gets the CAPTCHA then the users "guess" for the unknown word is recorded, over time a word is given a probability score and when high enough becomes a known word.

They Also include links to re-captcha modules for two of the popular CMS/blogging tools - WordPress and Drupal - to make integration easy.

According to this new post from David Coallier, the PEAR website now includes a feature the main PHP manual has had for a while now - user comments.

For the past few days with the help of Greg Beaver (CelloG), I have been implementing user notes in the pear user documentation. This is now live and running using text-captcha-numeral and an administration backend where any developer can approve comments.

[...] Anyways, this is currently working, you have to go on a package's documentation link and then click on end-user documentation. You will then notice at the bottom a link that says "Add a note/comment".

He's also looking at adding some Javascript functionality to make it a bit more "pretty" (some jQuery features like popups/fading/etc). You can see an example of it already on the MDB2 documentation page.

On the FuzzyOpinions blog, there's a basic tutorial that walks you through the creation of a CAPTCHA system to use how you'd like on your site. They target it towards the most common use - blocking unwanted comments to a site from spambots.

Although you might not know it by the name, a captcha is one of those little boxes you see, more and more lately, that ask you to type in a random code to verify that you are a human being and not a robot. There are many different varieties, but the basic idea is an image that is obscured slightly but readable by a human and used as a passcode for secure entry to a system or task.

The method is a simple combination of random text, a custom image, some of the PHP graphics functions, and a little addition to your HTML form (and PHP session) to get things up and running.

On Splitbrain.org, there's a new post that points out a script he's created to make adding comments to any PHP script possible - My Two Cents.

I recently updated My Two Cents. My Two Cents (or MTC) is a simple PHP class to add comments to any PHP driven site. It is was written with simplicity in mind but still has some strong features and is easily tweakable. It consists of a single PHP file and can be added with just a few lines of code.

The post also describes some of the functionality it comes with, including a CAPTCHA mechanism and a blacklist feature to help reduce spam. There's also a bit of multi-language support included as well.

From Cclair.nl, there's a new post sharing some code that's been created in an effort to make a "more modern CAPTCHA".

"ModernCaptcha" is a simple script in order to prevent spam in a very user friendly way. In a few words, your visitors don't have to type some characters as you see on the most websites, the verification is made by choosing the company name belonging to the logo that is show.

It's an interesting approach, but, as one reader pointed out, bots has a one in five chance of guessing correctly. That's way less than with a more standard image manipulation CAPTCHA method. I'm not sure I'd want to use it on my sites, but it might be good for a smaller site.

There's a demo of the end result and a download of the latest version as well as some limited support provided in the comments of the post.

PHPClasses.org is spotlighting another package from their site today - this time it's a CAPTCHA class that takes things a step further and introduces animation into the mix to make it even harder for bots to get through.

Laszlo Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.

Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all.

You can check out the class here, including a sample animated gif file and a download of everything you'll need to get started.