The Solar Blog has linked to the latest download for the complete Solar system with no subversion connection needed:

As of late last night, you can now download (no SVN required) a tarball of a fully-operational Solar system with the 1.0.0alpha2 code in place: http://svn.solarphp.com/system/download/solar-system-1.0.0alpha2.tgz.

The three-step install instructions are also included - check out the download page for a quickstart guide on using this new code.

In a new blog entry Lukas Smith notes that the latest alpha release, version 2, of the PHP 5.3 series is now available for download from the PHP QA website.

If you check the qa website you will see that there is a new alpha release of our next minor version PHP 5.3.0 out that is awaiting your testing (remember no whining about BC breaks if you did not test the pre-release versions). [...] Aside from a few additions, it was mainly bug fixing in this release. The biggest changes happened in the fileinfo extension.

The Windows infrastructure has been moved off on its own with lots of different binaries to choose from. The next version could either be another alpha release or make the jump up to beta - feedback for the aplha2 and the namespacing inclusion will make that determination.

In a recent post to his blog Tony Bibbs shares his experience with getting the most recent release (PHP 5.3 alpha) of PHP up and working on his MacBook.

If there is anything you should gleam from this article for future reference, Leopard comes with a 64bit Apache installation.

He points out this fact because, if you go and build it as per the normal install instructions, it will toss a "wrong architecture" error. He points out a blog post from Marc Liyanage that helped him understand a bit better. His fix was to run Apache as 32 bit instead of trying to get PHP to compile up to its 64 bit standards. He even includes the two commands you'll need to change Apache over to run this way.

With the recent release of the first alpha of PHP 5.3, the community has been talking and testing this new version - here's just a few:

• Johannes Schluter looking at the actual release
• The PHP 10.0 blog mentioning the impact this new release will have on the language and the web
• and a few tests that Lars Strojny has already run on the release.
• Evert Pot's look at some of the upcoming features of PHP 5.3 (including code)
• Some testing from PHP Freaks
• A note about some testing with the Stubbles framework

You can check out this page on the PHP.net wiki for more information on what's left for the final release and a tentative schedule for the releases in between.

As announced on the PHP.net site today, the first alpha version of the much-anticipated PHP 5.3 has been released - PHP 5.3 alpha 1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

Among the list of new features/improvements are things like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions, closures, support for mysqlnd and removal of support for pre-Windows 2000 systems. For more information on when the full stable version will his the web, check out the release plan.

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.

Mike Gauthier has created a PEAR-based implementation for the popular Akismet spam filtering system that he's added to the site:

I'd like to let you know about a new PHP 5 implementation of the Akismet REST API. The package, Services_Akismet is MIT licensed and distributed through the official PEAR channel at http://pear.php.net/package/Services_Akismet.

Hopefully this will make it even easier for third-party PHP projects to use Akismet spam tools. The code is well documented and should "just work" on any PHP 5.2.1+ system.

It's currently in its alpha stage and was derived from the miPHP Akismet class written by Bret Kuhns.

Travis Swicegood has announced the release of the latest versions (both in alpha) of two of his PHP packages - PHPT_Ensure and PHPT_Core.

I woke up this morning a bit before 5 and couldn't go back to sleep. I decided to try to get some of the busy work on a new package, PHPT_Ensure finished up. I hinted at it a few weeks ago, but now it's ready for use, albeit a bit limited.

You'll need to update the Core package as well to get it up and running. He shows some sample output from a sample test and mentions some challenges he's still facing (like comparing arrays).

Paul Jones is happy to announce that the Solar PHP framework he develops on has made it to the next major stage in its development - Solar 1.0.0 alpha 1 release.

After more months of breaks, changes, additions, and refactoring, I'm (finallly) at the point where I'm ready to call the Solar framework for PHP 5 feature-complete. The first of this feature-complete series is the new Solar-1.0.0alpha1 release as of Sunday, 11 Nov, 2007. We now have at least 80% of everything you would need to build web-based and cli-based applications. This is a big milestone for the project.

Some of the "highlights" of this new release he mentions include:

• The new Solar_Controller_Console and Solar_Controller_Command classes are analagous to front and page controllers, respectively, for the command line.
• The new Solar_Filter class combines validating and sanitizing.
• We've moved a lot of the core functions of the Solar arch-class to their own static classes
• Lots of changes in the Solar_Sql package related to database portability

There's also a new ORM system he mentions - mainly the major addition of Solar_Sql_Model (and its friends). Check out the community wiki for the new functionality to get started.

On the Sanisoft blog , Amit Badkas has posted a few fixes that he found when he was trying to make the upgrade from CakePHP 1.2 alpha to the 1.2 prebeta version of the framework:

Today a new version of cakephp-1.2's pre-beta released, Eager to upgrade I plugged it into the new Cheesecake2 codebase which was happily on cakephp-1.2's last alpha (released on 9th July). As expected some minor migration issues did crop up immediately, posting the list below.

He has a list of four:

• No more debug, cake_admin etc. constants in config/core.php
• Addition of fieldset/legend around radio buttons
• Label given for radio buttons group does not appear but radio buttons texts appear as labels
• The 'inbetween' has been removed

Each has helpful hints around (or to fix them) included.