Felix Geisendorfer has posted an announcement to the Debuggable blog about the upcoming stable release of the next major version of the CakePHP framework, version 1.2.

The CakePHP team is gearing up to finally push out a stable 1.2 release! If you are following the trac timeline you can see that everybody is putting in huge amounts of work to fix bugs and get everything stable.

He suggests a few ways to get involved in helping to push this release out the door like writing test cases, showing how to replicate bugs and help out the documentation team with their efforts to keep the manual up to date.

The Zend Developer Zone has come across an interesting face about the SourceForge website - it uses the Zend Framework to add OpenID functionality to its pages.

According to the press release from SF about their OpenID support:

OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we're happy to be jumping into it. it's bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. [...] We've spent the past couple weeks on it - integrating the Zend Framework OpenID component into our site code. we like the framework as a whole and I personally hope to use more of it in the future.

There might be a few kinks in the process, so if you're seeing issues with your OpenID working on their site, check out the FAQ they've posted to help.

Silvan Muhlemann has posted about the unit testing that tillate.com does for their releases - the whole process from start to finish.

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I'd like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests.

He talks about their choice of SimpleTest, their test monitoring, CruiseControl and their "if it doesn't pass, you can't release it" mentality to keep their site as bug free as possible.

The Internet Super Hero blog has announced the release of the latest alpha version of the mysql native driver for PDO - version 1.0.2-alpha (PDO_MYSQLND):

I am glad to announce the availability of the first alpha version of PDO_MYSQLND. PDO_MYSQLND is a PHP PDO driver for MySQL based on the MySQL native driver. PDO_MYSQLND 1.0.2-alpha is available for download on http://downloads.mysql.com/forge/pdo_mysqlnd_preview.

Updates include fixes for return values, patches for memory leaks, more code coverage and some "very promising results" running on a set of dedicated testing machines.

The PHP development team has released the latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series today - version 5.2.6:

This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security updates include prevention of a buffer overflow in FastCGI mode, an integer overflow in printf, correction for a safe_mode bypass method in cURL and the bundling of PCRE 7.6 to update the regular expression functionality of the language.

You can grab this latest release from the downloads page on PHP.net (or your favorite mirror) - both the source and the Windows binaries.

php|architect has announced the release of a new book - the Guide to Programming Magento, now up for preorder:

We're happy to announce the upcoming release of php|architect's Guide to Programming Magento, the first comprehensive guide for developers who want to learn more about the Magento e-commerce platform.

The book, by Mark Kimsal shows you how to install and successfully deploy a Magento installation on your website. The preorder is available right now for a 15% discount and the full PDF version will be released on May 15th, 2008 (print on May 31st). Check out the product page for more information and to reserve your copy today.

Eirik Hoem has posted about the latest update of his favorite framework being ready for download - Prado.

My favorite PHP framework just got a new release, adding several new components and fixing 30-ish bugs. The bundled JavaScript libs (Prototype / script.aculo.us) have also been upgraded, so that should help lots of people struggling with the old versions.

You can download the framework from its website and, if you're new to it, check out the tutorial to get you started. Prado is a free PHP5-based rapid application development framework that doesn't go with the usual MVC format of most frameworks. It opts instead for "logic be stored in classes and presentation in templates".

Padraic Brady has noted that the latest release candidate of the HTMLPurifier software has been posted for download:

HTMLPurifer is possibly the most understated underpublicised quality library in PHP today. I consider it a fundamental standard library that is automatically included in every PHP web application I start these days.

This latest release candidate (their first!) includes updates on two major features - the use of autoloading and a change to the way you use the filters. Check out a demo of it in action or just download this latest release and try it out for yourself.

Christopher Jones has posted an announcement about the latest release of the PECL OCI8 package (version 1.3.2 Beta) hitting the streets:

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

Derick Rethans has posted about new versions of two PHP extensions with "very distinctive purposes" - VLD and translit.

VLD is for the "hardcore hackers" out there to see what's happening behind the scenes for each request made to PHP and the translit extension makes it easier to "transliterate" information into other formats (with filters like "normalize_numbers" and converting text to Chinese).

You can grab the updated version through the standard pecl interface or from their pages on the PECL site.