Chris Hartjes, a guru of CakePHP knowledge, is putting together a book - "Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP".

Some of you may know that I have started writing a e-book about CakePHP. I'm planning on publishing it myself for the low, low price of $7. I thought I'd let people take a sneak peek at how it looks so far by publishing the first two chapters in very rough form.

You can find a rough draft here (pdf). Keep an eye out on Chris' blog for more (possible) preview releases and for the final product once its wrapped.

Ian Selby has posted a look at the newly released PHP support by the Aptana software:

Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we've been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects.

He talks about new features like content assist (adding userland code to the automatic completion), completion of functions with parameters already filled in and a PHP preview server and debugger built right in. You can get more information on the Aptana website.

Maxime Bouroumeau-Fuseau sent over a note about a project that's been started to try to port as much of PHP over to Javascript as possible - the Harmony Framework.

Nearly all of php features are already supported and the process is nearly instantaneous! Harmony also comes with Harmony XML, a Flex MXML like language to create components in xml and php.

The homepage even has a converter that you can use to make the PHP->Javascript transition for your own scripts. The framework is still in a Preview stage, but it already looks promising.

The Zend Developer Zone has announced the release of the latest preview of the Zend Framework - the Preview Release for 1.7.

We are excited to announce that the Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available from the Zend Framework download site! While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release.

Updates included in this release are things like the Zend_Amf component, an update of the Dojo toolkit, support for the dijit editor, some performance enhancements and other locale and internationalization changes.

You can download this latest release from the Zend Framework download page and be sure to log any problems you find into the issue tracker and help the ZF team make the framework even better.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post detailing some of the new features (a sneak peek) of the upcoming Zend Studio for Eclipse version.

I am very excited to announce that Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.1 has been released, and would like to share with you some of its new features. This release is a "Complete Web Development Environment for PHP Developers", as it provides significant improvements for Web developers who utilize a rich code base that includes PHP, JavaScript, and CSS.

Major updates include the ability to edit the source of Javascript, Dojo and CSS, more Zend Framework integration, improved management tools and lots of bug fixes and security improvements. Screenshots of each of these improvements are in the post, including a look at the SQL query builder tool.

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.

As announced on the PHP.net site today, the first alpha version of the much-anticipated PHP 5.3 has been released - PHP 5.3 alpha 1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

Among the list of new features/improvements are things like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions, closures, support for mysqlnd and removal of support for pre-Windows 2000 systems. For more information on when the full stable version will his the web, check out the release plan.

The Internet Super Hero blog has posted about a preview release of the PDO_MYSQLND and a connector for MySQL to Open Office that have both been announced at this year's MySQL Conference.

The post explains what each of the technologies are for and where they fit in most development. The PDO_MYSQLND functionality is a direct connection for the PDO libraries to connect to MySQL using the native driver.

PDO_MYSQLND inherits all benefits of the MySQL native driver for PHP. In addition to the shared advantages you get the first PDO driver for MySQL developed by Sun/MySQL!

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.

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.