Damien Seguy has posted this month's (well, January 2008's) PHP statistics to the Nexen.net website. Highlights from this edition include:

• PHP 5 displays strong growth, almost at 30%
• PHP 5.2 will be more popular than PHP 4.3 before April
• PHP 5.2.5 is already the dominating version of PHP 5
• PHP 4.4.8 not so popular

You can get the full details on this month's statistics from the full list of the statistics and the evolution posted on Nexen.

The Zend Developer Zone has "lifted the skirt" on a new feature in the Zend Framework today with this new article - a look at the Zend_Form component, a simple method for creating, validating and generally working with your user's input.

Zend_Form gives you all the tools necessary to create forms and form elements via PHP code. Like everything in Zend Framework, almost everything is configurable; however the defaults are probably good for most uses.

They include some sample code that shows the creation of both a simple, sample form and something a little bit more advanced - including validation methods and making fields required.