Marco Tabini has posted his list of what he considers five features of PHP5 that you "can't afford to ignore" when doing your development work:

Despite the fact that you may not have a choice in the matter, upgrading comes with a number of bonus new features that can help you write better code and gain access to new functionality that required a fair amount of hacking in previous version. Here's a quick list of 5 personal favourites.

The feature to make his list are SimpleXML, JSON/SOAP, PDO, the Standard PHP Library and SQLite. Each has their own bonus feature(s) included too for a little extra incentive to check them out.

If you're a CakePHP user and have been frustrated by how this "bake" functionality doesn't allow for more than one validation rule on a given field, check out the new post on the SaniSoft blog (from Amit Badkas):

This is not much of a problem if you have only a few models but when you start to work on several dozen models in a project it becomes very tedious to open each and every model file to make changes.

The result of his frustration has come out in the form of a patch as a part of a new ticket in the CakePHP request submission process.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new article/tutorial posted today about the new features and functionality that's included with the latest release of the Zend Framework, version 1.5.

The popular open source Zend Framework just got some slick enhancements. Learn what's new in V1.5 and how upgrades, including Zend_Form, Zend_Layout, and Zend_View, enhanced support for GData Web services, and improved Ajax support can help PHP developers easily roll out cutting-edge Web applications.

They walk through each of the new components (or features in them) like Zend_Form and Zend_Layout/Zend_View with examples included. There's also mention of other miscellaneous updates like the addition of OpenID and InfoCard support, a LDAP authentication module and an interface with Google's GData service.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has written up a post for his blog outlining some of the other cool little features that were included in the recent release of the Zend Framework, specifically with the Zend_Form component.

I've been working on for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.

These additional features Matthew mentions are:

• Internationalization
• Element Grouping
• Array Support

Check out more of the great features of the component in the Zend Framework documentation.

According to this post on the PEAR blog, the first PEAR bug triage is now over:

PEAR's bug tracker hit the 600+ open bugs mark a month ago. [...] So with 600+ open bugs (not including the feature requests), we had to do something. [...] The logical step was to hold our own bug smashing event and see how it works for PEAR.

Back on March 22nd and 23rd (Easter weekend) they hunted for bugs. Several developers showed to help out and many bugs were fixed and they managed to bring the number of open bugs for PEAR down to 547 with the two days of work. There were some milestones reached too:

Thanks to the triage, we are close to reaching two important milestones: Closing bug reports with lower bug ID than 1000 (1 bug left!) and 2000 (5 left).

On his blog today Martynas Jusevicius talks about a feature that was new in PHP5 - Exceptions:

A useful new feature in PHP 5 is exception handling via the try/throw/catch paradigm. An exception may be thrown and caught. If an exception is thrown in code surrounded by try, the following statements will not be executed, and the exception will be handled by the first matching catch block.

He gives a high-level overview of how Exceptions in PHP5 work and includes a simple example from his work with his DIY Framework.

Eirik Hoem has posted an update on a previous problem he was having when working with SOAP in PHP and its handling of arrays.

The scenario was that when an array with only one object was returned over SOAP the array was discarded and pointed straight to the single object.

Come to find out, this behavior wasn't a bug, it was a feature - the fix is to add another parameter to the initialization of the SoapClient to add the SOAP_SINGLE_ELEMENT_ARRAYS feature.

In a new post to his blog today, Matthew Weir O'Phinney dives in to some of the more advanced features that the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework has to offer.

I've been working on for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.

These additional features include internationalization, element grouping and array support. He looks at each of these, including some sample code where needed, and shows you how they can be useful to you and your ZF application.

As the Zend Developer Zone points out, the preview release for the next stable version of the Zend Framework has been posted - ZF 1.5.0 Preview.

This release showcases features that will be introduced in the final 1.5 release. The intent of this release is to give our users access to the latest features in Zend Framework and to improve the overall quality of the production release through the feedback we receive.

Some of the new feature in this upcoming release include:

• New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
• Infocard, OpenID, and LDAP authentication adapters
• Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
• New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts

It also adds functionality to currently existing features and fixes several bugs in the process.

Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.

I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.

Some of the updates include:

• One column design instead of the 2 column design
• Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts
• The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore
• Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts
• The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks!
• Patch uploading during ticket creation now works

He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.