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.

On Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today, there's a quick release note about the latest version of his PECL package, Zip, being released - 1.4.0.

I just release Zip-1.4.0. This release adds support for all kind of comments, read or write. One bug has been fixed, Windows users may had problems to add files to an existing archives. Thanks to Irokez (pear's OpenDocument project for SoC) to have catched it.

He also includes a brief code example of the commenting functionality.