David Goodwin has pointed out a new open source project that the PalePurple group are releasing - the Virtual Planning Board.

It's basically a piece of web-based software, written in Python and PHP, that allows you to allocate tickets from multiple Trac projects to a simple week-based 'board' in order to organise work priority for developers.

I've written about why we wanted this, and created a short user guide on the Trac site for the project. This is still in development and we're working on some more features (You can see what we've got planned from our timeline).

It's been released under the GPL and has a Subversion repository where you can grab the latest code from. There's also an installation guide that's been developed to help you get started.

Toomas Romer has posted about his latest release for the framework he's developed to create a simple Eclipse plugin with PHP.

After three weeks we have the next release of Eclipse Plugins in Php ready. The update site is the same.

Changes include a reworked API, the ability to pass method arguments to PHP, bundling of the Quercus software, a tests subproject, and an updated quick-start/step-by-step example. He explains the updates to the API and some of the licensing issues surrounding the use of Quercus in the post as well.

As mentioned in this new post on the php|architect website, the eZ Systems group have announced a new extension for their software (eZ Publish) to link with an Oracle database, under a GPL license no less.

This extension was previously only available under a proprietary license and was sold from $899 to $2999. It is now freely available. Last year, eZ Systems also released the Online Editor, previously only available under a proprietary license, as Open Source software under the GPL.

For more information, check out the project's documentation on the extension or just download it and get busy working.

Chris Shiflett has some good news for all of the Zend Framework fans out there - the license that it's under is now compatible with the GPL.

Chris notes also that it's a welcome change over to this pre-existing license to reduce the number of licenses that companies would have to change/evaluate.