The eZ Components project has release their latest stable version - 2008.2 - for public consumption today:

The development team is happy to announce the release of the seventh major version of eZ Components: version 2008.2. The main new development of this release is focused on the MvcTools (and accompanying) components.

The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework, providing a dispatcher, request parsers, routing, view support and a response writer. Examples of its use can be found in the subversion repository for the project. You can see the full Changlog for the release here and you can download the latest release here.

Padraic Brady has released chapter one and chapter two of his "Surviving the Deep End" Zend Framework book:

As many of you know, the book is available online without charge. [...] Let me know your thoughts, and post any general comments or questions on the book or website here. I'll be adding a general end-of-page comment system to the mix during the next day or two so posting general comments here is a temporary stopgap.

The first chapter is just an introduction looking at what the book will cover and what the framework's all about. Chapter two gets a bit more in depth, looking at the architecture of the Zend Framework and details things like routing and how it implements MVC.

The NETTUTS.com site has a new tutorial/screencast posted looking at their method for opening up uploaded zip files with PHP:

ThemeForest has a nice feature; It allows the authors to upload zip files containing screenshots of their themes. A script then extracts these files and displays the images accordingly. Though I doubt that the developers used PHP to accomplish this task...that's what we're going to use!

They create a simple form with one field - a file input - and write some basic PHP around it. The script ensures that it was a zip file that was uploaded (based on the mime type) and passes it through a ZipArchive class to do the hard work. This class and the rest of the source can be downloaded from the site.

eZ Components, the enterprise-ready library of PHP components (that can be used together or separately for PHP applications has made a new release candidate available for download:

The eZ Components team just released a release candidate of the new 2008.2 release. This release candidate resolves a couple of issues that where found during the testing and review process. The release candidate can be installed by running the following command: pear upgrade ezc/ezcomponents

You can also download the full package from the downloads page on the eZ Components site. Check out the release announcement for more information on whats been updated.

The NETTUTS.com site has an in-depth tutorial looking at the anatomy of a WordPress plugin:

WordPress is well known for its amazing collection of free plugins. There is one for almost every need you can think of, from backing up your WordPress installation to asking for a cup of coffee or fighting spam. But there are times when none of the available plugins seem to quite do the trick you are looking for. To help you in moments like that, this tutorial will guide you through every step of building a simple, widgetized WordPress plugin with settings.

They break it out into a few sections - the plugin template (files and directories), adding in the first functionality, making the widget for the plugin's output, add in a few settings and you're good to go. You can download the source if you want to dig right in and get going.

As Andi Gutmans mentions on his blog, the Zend Framework has reached the 10 million downloads mark and is still going strong:

When I started the Zend Framework project back in 2005 I was sure that we could make a difference. Some thought it was a long shot with too ambitious goals, after all I wanted to start from scratch without a single line of code, no community contributors and no corporate contributors. We are now 3.5 years later and I have to say Zend Framework's success has exceeded my own foresight and expectations.

He mentions the teams behind the Framework and some of Zend's partners that have helped to make it an amazing success.

The NETTUTS.com site has posted the next part in their series on the creation of a photo site with PHP and jQuery. This time they focus on the backend of the application, written in PHP.

For those of you who have been following the last few screencasts, you must have noticed that each tutorial has been centered around a "photo site" theme. (See Scanning Folders With PHP, How to Dynamically Create Thumbnails, and Create a Photo-Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery. Today, we'll build the backend for a photo site. This tutorial will teach you how to add, delete, and update photos.

You can watch the screencast right in the post as well as follow along with the tutorial steps and download the source for their example.

Brian Moon has released a simple blogging application he's worked up - a super-simple, lightweight application that already has several of the common blog features built in.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging. It works quite well. You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need. My wife uses Blogger for our family blog. It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways. But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice. So, why would I want to reinvent the wheel? I am a control freak and rarely run other people's code. I know, it is a character flaw. I am working on it.

His application, WordCraft, already includes things like Akismet/CAPTCHA support for comments, custom page creation, pingback support, temlpating and email notifications. You can download the latest release (version 0.5) from his google code page.

Rob Allen has made a new post today showing off Action Helpers in the Zend Framework.

When you have some functionality that needs to be shared across multiple controllers, one method is to use action helpers. Action helpers are very powerful and contain hooks to automatically run when you need them too, but you can ignore all that if you don't need it.

He includes how to set up the "helper broker" pointing it at your helper files and a simple helper that multiplies the input times two. This helper is then applied inside of his example action (in an IndexController, of course) and assigned to an output variable in the view. He's included a code download as an example.

Chris Jones has pointed out a video of a recent presentation at the Singapore PHP User Group Meeting done by Blair Layton (of Oracle Asia Pacific) on the OCI8 extension and using it to connect PHP.

While most PHP developers start off on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack there maybe a need to investigate OPAL (Oracle, PHP, Apache, Linux). This talk will discuss what Oracle offers PHP developers including operating system, database, middleware and tools support. You will find out how to take advantage of specific features in Oracle Database 11g that assist PHP developers such as Database Resident Connection Pooling with code samples and demos. An example architecture from a USA web company of a highly scalable PHP application that uses Oracle database will also be discussed.

His slides are also available for download - Set 1, Set 2 and you can watch the full video here.