The latest version of the Zend Framework, 1.7.0, has officially been released:

The Zend Framework team would like to thank everyone who made this release possible. As always, our generous ZF community has provided countless new features, bug fixes, documentation translations, etc. We'd also like to thank Adobe Systems and Wade Arnold for contributing the new Zend_Amf component. A big thanks to PHP Belgium and everyone who participated in bug hunt day and/or the Zend Framework bug hunt week.

This update includes lots of new components and features such as: an update to Dojo, Zend_Service_Twitter, support for Open Office Documents in the Zend_Search_Lucene component, Zend_ProgressBar, I18N improvements and much, much more. Check out the full list on this post on the Zend Developer Zone or just head over the download the latest edition.

You can also check out some of Matthew Weier O'Phinney's comments over on his blog as well as thoughts from Zend's own Andi Gutmans on his blog.

In this new post to the symfony blog, there's an update on the framework's latest version, Propel integration and the addition of the sfDoctrinePlugin.

After more that two years of development, the Propel team has released Propel 1.3 yesterday. This is a great achievement as Propel 1.3 sports a lot a new exciting features.

These features include PDO integration, object instance pooling, improvements to the date handling features and the addition of more default values for database schemas. There's also the updates with Doctrine:

As announced in the symfony 1.2 roadmap, Doctrine 1.0 will be officially supported and the sfDoctrinePlugin will be bundled with symfony 1.2. Doctrine 1.0 beta1 has been released two weeks ago and the Doctrine team will release Doctrine 1.0 final on September 1st.

With the recent release of the first alpha of PHP 5.3, the community has been talking and testing this new version - here's just a few:

• Johannes Schluter looking at the actual release
• The PHP 10.0 blog mentioning the impact this new release will have on the language and the web
• and a few tests that Lars Strojny has already run on the release.
• Evert Pot's look at some of the upcoming features of PHP 5.3 (including code)
• Some testing from PHP Freaks
• A note about some testing with the Stubbles framework

You can check out this page on the PHP.net wiki for more information on what's left for the final release and a tentative schedule for the releases in between.

According to this new post to the Symfony blog, fans of the framework have a new reason to be happy - the latest version, 1.1, has officially been released.

As you may know, we have been working for a very long time on the next stable version of symfony. Now the day has come to celebrate the immediate availability of the long awaited 1.1 stable release of the symfony framework!

Just some of the new features include the framework's new architecture, its brand new YAML parser, the bundling of Propel as a plugin and the addition of over 8,500 functional tests to ensure the solid structure of the framework stands.

You can either update/install this latest version with the pear command line functionality or download the package directly from the site.

Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.

Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.

He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.

Justin Silverton writes, in a new post to the JSLabs website, about a webserver that has been written up entirely in PHP called Nanoweb.

Have you ever wanted a web server written entirely in PHP? Now you can with nanoweb. A project like this really shows the power of the PHP language.

Some of the features of the application include: HTTP/1.1 implementation, Modular architecture, Authentication support, MIME support, and, of course, PHP support. There's even been some performance stats created for it to show its robustness, and installation is as easy as running an install script (or batch file).

The phpPgAdmin development team is happy to announce the release of the latest version of their software - phpPgAdmin 4.1.

The phpPgAdmin Team is proud to announce a new major release of phpPgAdmin. Version 4.1 adds many new features, bug fixes and updated translations over the previous version.

Updates include:

• New icons by Niko , from the graphics repository on pgFoundry
• Send encrypted passwords over the wire wherever possible
• Display Prepared Transactions
• Add Support For IN/OUT Parameters

and many more. Check out this posting for a more complete listing or just head straight to the download page to grab the update.

As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a walk-through that's been posted for the just-released version of Zend's editor - Zend Studio 5.5.

Earlier this month, I posted the release announcement for Zend Studio 5.5. Today, I got an email from my friend Avigail pointing me to a new web cast recorded by Yossi Leon the Product Manager, Zender, and all around nice guy has released a web cast walk through of some of the new features in this latest release.

The webcast shows off features like the Java code completion, Zend Framework code completion and integration functionality, and Zend Platform integration. If you've been looking around for a new IDE to work up code in, give the demo a look and see what you think.

Continuing in their effort to help PHP developers keep their code bug-free, DevShed has posted part two of the series looking at unit testing your applications. Previously they had looked at the basics - of they work and what they're for. This time, they dig a little deeper, showing some of the additional features and conditions that PHPUnit has to offer.

This week, you will learn about running multiple tests simultaneously, creating more informative error messages, and more.

They get back into something they mentioned briefly before - packaging tests in a separate archive to keep it out of the main body of code (the same way separating content and display functionality is good). They also talk about how to run more than one test at the same time, a handy feature that lets you make regression tests.

They also show how to create more informative error messages and how to manually add more testing conditions for you to check custom bits of code that don't quite fit with the assertNull, assertEquals, and assertFalse crowd.

This article is an excerpt from the Sams Publishing book "Advanced PHP Programming" by George Schlossnagle.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a quick look at one somewhat underused PHP tools out there that could help tremendously in the long run and do something that most developers run screaming from - writing documentation. They talk about the wonderful phpDocumentor package.

Documentation is a very important part of development. It will not only allow you to come back to an application or piece of code in the future with ease, but also help future coders (in the open source community or at your job, etc) that may be utilizing your source code.

They look briefly at it's features, the installation process, and how you can start documenting code right off the bat with the help of examples and a sample phpdoc statement they provide.