On behalf of the Zend Framework team and the framework’s many contributors, I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of the stable release of Zend Framework 1.10.0. You can download it from our downloads page:

http://framework.zend.com/download/latest

This release includes a ton of new features (more on those below), as well as some huge changes to our documentation.

Our documentation has been slightly re-organized into new sections. Previously, the manual was divided simply into chapters, one per component. Those chapters still exist, but have been moved into an explicit “Reference Guide” section. We have also added a new section entitled, “Learning Zend Framework,” that includes a number of tutorials for using various framework components, including our former “Quick Start” guide. Initially, we’re offering nine tutorials, ranging from first steps to advanced layout and view usage, to search and pagination. These tutorials are now an official part of our documentation, and you can expect improvements, translations, and additions in the versions to come.

To render our documentation, we’ve moved from the venerable xsltproc to PHP.net’s own PhD. This provides us more flexibility in how we render the manual — including the ability to render it differently for packaging versus the online manual. Additionally, it brings the rendering time down from over an hour to just minutes — which will make the release process faster and smoother. Please join me in thanking Shahar Evron and Hannes Magnusson for assisting in our transition to this fantastic tool.

Another big change is that we are now providing versioned documentation on the website. For each minor revision of Zend Framework (1.10, 1.9, 1.8, etc), you can now find both the manual as well as the API documentation. This should assist users who are building off of older versions of ZF.

Finally, our download page has a new design, aimed to be simpler and more visually appealing.

We have a few more site updates in store that we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks; stay tuned for further announcements!

Below is a list of new features included in the 1.10.0 stable release:

  • Zend_Barcode, contributed by Mickael Perraud
  • Zend_Cache_Backend_Static, contributed by Pádraic Brady
  • Zend_Cache_Manager, contributed by Pádraic Brady
  • Zend_Exception – previous exception support, contributed by Marc Bennewitz
  • Zend_Feed_Pubsubhubbub, contributed by Pádraic Brady
  • Zend_Feed_Writer, contributed by Pádraic Brady
  • Zend_Filter_Boolean, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Filter_Compress/Decompress, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Filter_Null, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Log::factory(), contributed by Mark van der Velden and Martin Roest (of ibuildings)
  • Zend_Log_Writer_ZendMonitor, contributed by Matthew Weier O’Phinney
  • Zend_Markup, contributed by Pieter Kokx
  • Zend_Oauth, contributed by Pádraic Brady
  • Zend_Serializer, contributed by Marc Bennewitz
  • Zend_Service_DeveloperGarden, contributed by Marco Kaiser
  • Zend_Service_LiveDocx, contributed by Jonathan Marron
  • Zend_Service_WindowsAzure, contributed by Maarten Balliauw
  • Zend_Validate_Barcode, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Validate_Callback, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Validate_CreditCard, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Validate_PostCode, contributed by Thomas Weidner
  • Zend_Pdf parsing speed has been improved by around 40%
  • Additions to Zend_Application resources, including Cachemanager, Dojo, Jquery, Layout, Log, Mail, and Multidb (contributed primarily by Dolf Schimmel)
  • Refactoring of Zend_Loader::loadClass() to conform to the PHP Framework Interop Group reference implementation, which allows for autoloading PHP 5.3 namespaced code
  • Updated Dojo version to 1.4

Zend_Tool was refactored to eliminate issues and bottlenecks, as well as to add a number of new features:

  • New CLI runner with home directory and configuration support
  • New providers for Model generation, DbAdapter setup, Layouts and Form Generation
  • Default project structure comes with logging support in the ErrorController

As you will note from the above, this release was very much community-driven. In addition to these direct contributions of features, we also received a ton of bugfixes during our community bug hunt days the last few months, tons of translations of our manual (particularly due to the addition of tutorials!), and had countless individuals step forward to report website issues (that we hopefully resolved with this release). Please join me in extending a huge thank you to the Zend Framework community!