Hi all,
It is my pleasure to announce the availability of Zend Framework 1.5.0 Preview Release!
“http://framework.zend.com/download”:http://framework.zend.com/download
This release showcases features that will be introduced in the final 1.5 release. The intent of this release is to give our users access to the latest features in Zend Framework and to improve the overall quality of the production release through the feedback we receive. In particular, *your* feedback could help make the Zend Framework 1.5 production release a success, so please post your comments and questions to the appropriate mailing list and bring bugs to our attention by creating an issue in our issue tracker:
“http://framework.zend.com/issues”:http://framework.zend.com/issues
An overview of new features:
*(disc) New Zend_Form component with support for AJAX-enabled form elements
* New action and view helpers for automating and facilitating AJAX requests and alternate response formats
* Infocard, OpenID, and LDAP authentication adapters
* Support for complex Lucene searches, including fuzzy, date-range, and wildcard queries
* Support for Lucene 2.1 index file format
* Partial, Placeholder, Action, and Header view helpers for advanced view composition and rendering
* New Zend_Layout component for automating and facilitating site layouts
* UTF-8 support for PDF documents
* New Technorati, SlideShare, and Remember the Milk web services
This release also includes many enhancements to existing features and solutions for known issues with existing framework components. For more information, please see README.txt in the framework distribution.
The code in this release provides a ‘sneak peek’ at features to be included in the upcoming Zend Framework 1.5 release and is not intended for production use. Please be aware that the API’s introduced in this release may not be final, and that the Zend Framework team does not guarantee backwards compatibility to this release in future releases of Zend Framework. Some of the code included in the library folder for this release is currently under development in the incubator repository. Inclusion in this release for such components and features does not necessarily imply inclusion for a production release of Zend Framework. We strongly discourage the use of this preview release in production environments or for projects that could not easily be refactored to work with future releases of Zend Framework. We strongly recommend evaluating these features for use in future projects, however, and would appreciate any feedback.
Thanks to all in the Zend Framework community who have volunteered their time and expertise to help make these releases possible! 
Best regards,
Darby
January 28, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I like that features that other frameworks such as Rails incorporate are now being included in the Zend framework. Having AJAX and form helpers built in are very nice. I am looking forward to the final release of 1.5.0!
January 29, 2008 at 1:28 am
As sad as this sounds, this just made my week… Glad to see things with ZF are going full steam ahead.. and that the popular Zend_Layout is close… Look forward to playing with this all first hand!!!
January 30, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I’d like to browse the manual pages for the current stable version, which is still 1.0.3, but now 1.5.0 PR manual pages have been merged without visual clues…
January 31, 2008 at 9:20 am
It looks very promising. Thanks to all developers involved!
January 31, 2008 at 2:53 pm
You can get the old documentation by going to the download page (http://framework.zend.com/download) and getting the latest stable release. Might not have the fancy css but it works.