Douglas Brown has discussed the advantages of using a PHP framework in his blog. If you’re new to the world of PHP frameworks, his post provides a concise list of the benefits you will gain. One of the key benefits he finds is: “MVC or Model- View- Controller is a well-known design pattern that demarcates the database and business logic from the presentation layer. This results in simple, clean and understandable code”. Of course, not everyone agrees! A spirited discussion is currently under way in the comments section of his post. Take a look, and put in your $0.02!

Just four months after the 1.1 release, the symfony team is proud to announce the immediate availability of symfony 1.2.
As always, it comes with a lot of exciting new features like full Doctrine support, or a new admin generator that
takes full advantages of the form framework introduced in symfony 1.1.

p. Padraic “Maugrim The Reaper” Brady posted on his blog that he has released 0.2.0 of PHPSpec. For those not familiar with the project, PHPSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) framework for PHP5.

Today’s special guest is Chris Hartjes. Chris has been building PHP applications since 1998. Currently employed as a Senior Developer for the Cake Development Corporation, Chris has been labeled as an “agent provocateur” within the PHP community. He contributes to open source projects (specifically CakePHP), gives lectures on programming-related topics and tries to share what he’s learned via his blog.

Today Chris is going to talk to us today about Glue Frameworks vs. Full Stack frameworks.

It is my pleasure to announce the release of Zend Framework 1.0.1.

This mini release includes fixes for 33 issues since the 1.0.0 release
only a month ago. These issues are generally bug fixes and improvements,
though some feature additions have been included with this release.

I am very proud to announce availability of the first production release of Zend Framework. Many thanks to the scores of PHP developers who have worked for many months to make this product milestone possible. Zend Framework has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible. Zend Framework is now the best class library available for PHP 5 web application development.

Our special guest today is Ed Finkler. Ed is a web application developer, security expert, graphic designer, and dabbling musician. He works for CERIAS at Purdue University, and is a member of the PHP Security Consortium. Today Ed is going to give us the lowdown on the PHP based framework, CodeIgniter.

p. Chris Hartjes, an agent provocateur in the PHP community, has posted an interesting blog on whether to use a Glue framework or a Full Stack framework. He even throws in a bit of Python discussion to keep things interesting.

One of my roles at Zend is as a Zend Framework developer, and as such, I’m
the lead developer on the MVC components. Yesterday, I committed a change to
core in preparation for the 1.0.0RC1 release that, while breaking backwards
compatability slightly, will also greatly simplify the integration between
the controller and view components.

p. Fabien Potencier has recently announced the release of symfony 1.0.3 on the symfony project blog.