As mentioned on Solar blog and a few other places on the web, the stable 1.0.0 version of the Solar PHP framework has been released, marking a significant milestone in the framework's development.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

On the Template Monster blog there's a recent post looking at some of the upcoming features in WordPress 3.0 that many WordPress site owners have eagerly been waiting for.

Alright bloggers, web surfers and simple web enthusiasts, we've got some fascinating news for you all. Yes, Internet community can't stop buzzing about the forthcoming release of the new version of #1 blogging software '" WordPress 3.0. [...] The official release is scheduled for May 2010 but now we have opportunity to mark the major advantages that this release will bring.

They list a few of the major enhancements that'll happen in the new release including:

• a built-in multi-user option
• custom post types
• a new default design/theme
• and changes related to security concerns

You can find out more about this upcoming release from this post to the man WordPress blog.

The PHP.net site has posted the release announcement for the latest PHP version in the PHP 5.3.x series - 5.3.2:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.2. This is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes. [...] For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.

Security/bug fixes included in this release take care of things like:

• Safe_mode validation inside tempnam
• A possible open_basedir/safe_mode bypass in sessions
• Added support for SHA-256 and SHA-512 to php's crypt.
• Fixed a bug in the garbage collector that could cause a crash
• Crashing when using ldap_next_reference

For more information on the release and what was fixed see the Changelog. You can download this release immediately - source code or Windows package.

Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has a new post to his blog about how he's truly and geekishly excited about the Zend Server 5 release.

Last week we released Zend Server 5 and it is another memorable moment for me. Not because the process of getting it out the door was all smooth (it sometimes felt like pulling teeth) or because it's a new major version of Zend Server.

He goes on to talk about the cod tracing feature of the new release (one of his favorite parts) and how it can really help developers trying to find those elusive bugs and see how things are working deeper inside their application. There's even a nice looking UI. You can find out more about Zend Server on the Zend website (including a link to download a free trial).

As mentioned on the main PHP site today, the latest version in the PHP 5.2 series has been released - PHP 5.2.13.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.13. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 40 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

For more information about the changes included in this release you can check out the full release announcement or the Changelog. As always, you can get this latest version from the downloads page.

According to this new message posted by Scott MacVicar of Facebook, the first versions of HipHop have officially been pushed to their account on github.

Today we've pushed an initial version of HipHop onto GitHub at http://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php. This source should build on CentOS 5.2 and Ubuntu 9.10. Any specific hard to find libraries are bundled where the license permits. Remember that while we're running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you. You should be comfortable with this sort of software as it's the first public release.

You can read more about the release on its github wiki and how to get it installed. Issues can be reported to this list.

Lorna Mitchell, heading up this year's Dutch PHP Conference, has released the official schedule for the event happening June 10th through the 12th.

The wait is over! The Dutch PHP Conference schedule is now available. [We've even gotten] someone complaining that the schedule is too good and he can't see everything he wants to!

Topics range from writing extensions and designing for reusable code to technical debt and stress-free deployment

You can find out more about the conference on its site and you can save your space by registering here. You can get a full three day ticket for 500 Euro, a "tutorials only" pass for 300 Euro and a "conference only" pass for 200 Euro.

Even before they've release the source for their much hyped HipHop PHP tool, Facebook has slipped another tool in under the radar and have already released it in github - XHP.

On the official announcement they describe what the tool is and what it can do for you:

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language to both make your front-end code easier to understand and help you avoid cross-site scripting attacks. XHP does this by making PHP understand XML document fragments, similar to what E4X does for ECMAScript (JavaScript). While PHP is typically used to write front-end code, by itself it isn't a very good language for generating HTML (as evidenced by the popularity of templating engines like Smarty). XHP is something between a programmatic UI library and a full templating system

Rasmus Lerdorf took the opportunity to play with this new tool and run some benchmarks on its performance in a more real situation than the form example Facebook gave:

The real question here is what is this runtime xml validation going to cost you. [...] Note that to build XHP you will need flex 2.5.35 which most distros won't have installed by default. Grab the flex tarball and ./configure && make install it. Then you are ready to go.

He created a simple class (a "singleton") and ran some benchmarks against it with Siege. I won't share the results of those benchmarks here, though - you'll need to visit Rasmus' site for those (but here's a hint, the future's not bright).

Facebook has made their official announcement about their secretive PHP project today and have scheduled an event for them to give the world more information on the project.

Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP.

The post elaborates a bit more on what the tool is (not really a compiler, more of an optimizer) and why they decided to go this direction. There's a bit of description on how the tool works and how the transformation happens.

Stay tuned to this post around 7:30pm Pacific time for more information.

As announced on the Symfony project's blog today, they are officially announcing the last release of the 1.0 series in favor of the 1.4 releases.

The 27th of January is kind of an important date in mankind history. Of course, everybody know it is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the date of the invention of the light-bulb by Thomas Edison. To this list, the core team is proud to add the last release of the symfony 1.0 branch: symfony 1.0.22.

It's been three years since the first release in the 1.0.x series was made and a lot of progress has come along since then (including a few other branches) including over 163,000 lines of code, 22 stable releases and more than 300 plugins. You can grab the latest from their 1.4.x series (currently 1.4.1) from thier download page either as a package or as a checkout from their Subversion repository.