According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.

After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.

Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.

Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.

The Zend Developer Zone has republished the latest roadmap for the Zend Framework as posted by Andi Gutmans of Zend.

Although not always visible due to the infrequent release of new framework packages, there has been a lot of progress in the past few months. More than 100 community members(!) have joined the effort by singing the CLA, and are contributing via proposals, comments, patches, code contributions or documentation improvements.

Now the Summer is over and everyone is back at work, we feel it's the right time to finish planning the 1.0 release. We believe that in order to make a successfull release and get closure on the various aspects, it makes most sense to break up the framework into a limited number of subject areas and form project teams around these areas instead of components.

The following is a list of such areas and the components we believe we should focus on for 1.0. As you can see, a large amount of the work has already been done, but we now have to focus on getting closure on them and tying up loose ends.

Some of the components they've listed fall under the categories of:

• Web & Web Services
• MVC & related
• Authentication & authorization
• Databases
• Documentation & translation

There is also a high-level look at what version 0.2 of the framework will contain and a return to the "post often" methodology they had before.

On WebProNews.com a PHP roadmap has been posted - a comprehensive look at what PHP is and how it's evolved.

We expect our readers to have a more than firm handle on what PHP is, but for completeness-sake: PHP (a recursive acronym of PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open source, server-side web-scripting language for creating dynamic pages.

They look first at what PHP has to offer, then how it's evolved, and finally a comparison of PHP to several other langauges, including Perl, Java, and Cold Fusion.

With all of the turmoil surrounding the PHP 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 releases just fading, there's already talk of the next release in the series - 5.1.2 - and a plan to follow to get there.

Here is a brief outline of how I see 5.1.2 release happening and what in my opinion should be included in the release. This is very much an RFC as far as the changes go, so feel free to comment.

First the release plan, my idea is to allow minor features with accompanying tests that do not introduce any BC issues or functionality regressions till the 10th of December. At this point we would go into a feature and major change lock down, till about 22nd of December when the first RC will be made.

Assuming a 1 week period without such fixes passes, final release will be tagged, making the last RC essentially that release. In the even critical issues are discovered, additional RCs will be rolled.

So, some of the target dates as mentioned above include Release Candidate 1 on Dec. 22nd, Release Candidate 2 on Jan. 5th, and a final of PHP 5.1.2 on Jan. 12th, 2006. You can also check out some of the planned changes as well...