Mirroring the move they made previously to move the Yahoo! Bookmarks service over to Symfony, the company has updating their Yahoo! Answers service to be the same. According to the symfony blog today:

Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

The post shares some of the thoughts behind the move including their philosophy, the design of the project and a link to a presentation given on the update.

The PHP group has made a two quick updates to the recent release of PHP 5.2.6 for the Windows users out there:

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).

Davey Shafik has posted a quick update about the php|architect guide to the Zend PHP5 Certification exam and its updates.

Just a quick note to say that the second edition of the study guide has been released. It features all erratta items fixed, as well as a new chapter on Database Programming. If you didn't grab it yet, it makes a great reference for any intermediate and above developer, as well as obviously being the study guide that it is meant to be

You can get more information on the book (and place your order) on the book's website - zceguide.com.

Ivo Jansch has an update on this year's Dutch PHP Conference 2008 posted to his blog today:

The first results of the CFI have been announced. Most requested speaker was Derick Rethans. He'll be at DPC and present an XDebug workshop on the Tutorial Day, and a presentation about the ezComponents framework on the main conference. Most requested topic was a look ahead at PHP5.3 and PHP6. We've found Stefan Priebsch, experienced speaker and expert on PHP migration, to be willing to present this topic. On the main conference day, he will give an overview of the future of PHP.

They're still in the process of looking for other speakers to fill in the last two spots abut the lineup for the rest of the conference is impressive - speakers like Zeev Suraski, Sebastian Bergmann, Gaylord Duke and Ivo Jansch himself will be presenting.

You can get more information about this two day event on the conference's main site.

The Symfony project is recommending you upgrade your plugins to the latest editions - an issue with the PEAR channel caused it to load the wrong ones:

A problem in the symfony project PEAR channel made the plugin-install task always install the oldest version of the plugins, instead of the latest. If you recently installed plugins with the symfony command line, you probably installed an outdated version. Plugins installed via SVN are not affected.

You'll need to run a plugin-upgrade command for each of the plugins installed on your system to ensure that you're completely up to date. The post has complete info on how to tell which plugins you have and the exact commands to issue to being them up to date.

The WordPress blog has posted a sneak peek of the upcoming release of the popular blogging tool - WordPress 2.5.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

They look at each of these - the new Dashboard, updates to the Write page and the changes to the Manage page. If you want to get a jump on the action before the stable release, go grab the latest Release Candidate and get going.

As per this announcement on the Zend Developer Zone website, the Zend Framework group has released the latest version of their application framework - Zend Framework 1.5.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, today announced the availability of version 1.5 of Zend Framework, the popular open source PHP framework [...] Additional features in Zend Framework 1.5 include support for several new services and enhancements to already popular features that make building modern web sites easier and faster than ever.

Updates include changes to Zend_Form, Zend_Layout, the LDAP authentication component, an update to the Lucene support, more Ajax functionality and much more. There's also a new service Zend has launched to provide more "official support" for developers/companies using the framework. You can find out more information about the service here.

Rob Allen has updates his tutorial that gets developers started with the Zend Framework for the latest release of the Framework - version 1.5:

Zend Framework 1.5 has now been released to mark the occasion I have significantly updated my Zend Framework Tutorial! The tutorial was first released on 16th August 2006 and was written against version 0.1 of Zend Framework and had one major revision to bring in support for the ViewRenderer component.

The updates include the addition of some of the "goodies" the new release offers - like Zend_Form's additions and Zend_Layout - as well as other smaller features that can make a Zend Framework-er's life easier.

The Pro::PHP Podcast (from php|architect) has posted its latest episode - their newscast for March 6th, 2008.

Back on track, mostly. We had to use the crappy internal mic on my laptop, but it's better than shouting to the next town over... right?

There's lots of different topics covered this time including the infamous CLA, Traits, Late Static Bindings, PHP on Windows, Drupal 6 and much more. You can either grab the show directly from the page or you can subscribe to their feed to get this and future episodes.

The long awaited update to the popular interface creation tool for PHP, the PHP-GTK libraries, has been released - PHP-GTK 2:

After a long development and QA cycle, we are proud to release version 2.0 of PHP-GTK. This release, named leap day special, marks PHP-GTK 2 as stable and comes with support for GTK+ versions 2.6 through 2.12. Although support for more recent versions than 2.8 is not 100% complete, we hope to cover as much of the API as possible in upcoming releases.

Several bloggers are also happy about the news including Elizabeth Smith and the PHP-GTK Community site

You can grab this latest download download page on the official PHP-GTK site (and check out the links to some of the great PHP-GTK resources out there too).