The key new features for me are:

• Namespaces
• Late static binding
• Closures
• Much better Windows support

There is a migration guide available, but you should also check out Cal Evans’ migration notes over at TechPortal too.

You can download it directly now, or wait for your favourite distribution to package it for you soon!

From the read me, new features include:

• Zend_Tool, contributed by Ralph Schindler
• Zend_Application, contributed by Ben Scholzen and Matthew Weier O’Phinney
• Zend_Navigation, contributed by Robin Skoglund
• Zend_CodeGenerator, by Ralph Schindler
• Zend_Reflection, Ralph Schindler and Matthew Weier O’Phinney
• Zend Server backend for Zend_Cache, contributed by Alexander Veremyev
• Zend_Service_Amazon_Ec2, contributed by Jon Whitcraft
• Zend_Service_Amazon_S3, Justin Plock and Stas Malyshev
• Zend_Filter_Encrypt, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Zend_Filter_Decrypt, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Support for file upload progress support in Zend_File_Transfer, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Translation-aware routes, contributed by Ben Scholzen
• Zend_Json expression support, contributed by Benjamin Eberlei and Oscar Reales
• Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl, contributed by Benjamin Eberlei
• SOAP input and output header support, contributed by Alexander Veremyev
• Support for keyword field search using query strings, contributed by Alexander Veremyev
• Support for searching across multiple indexes in Zend_Search_Lucene, contributed by Alexander Veremyev
• Support for page scaling, shifting and skewing in Zend_Pdf, contributed by Alexander Veremyev
• Locale support in Zend_Validate_Int and Zend_Validate_Float, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Phonecode support in Zend_Locale, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Zend_Validate_Iban, contributed by Thomas Weidner
• Zend_Validate_File_WordCount, contributed by Thomas Weidner

Download it here.

I have also completely revised and updated my Zend Framework tutorial over at akrabat.com to support the new Zend_Tool command line tool and Zend_Application for bootstrapping.

Please download and test this release thoroughly over the next few days so that we can fix any urgent issues or documentation problems before the final release next week. Please remember to provide feedback on our issue tracker and ask any questions on the appropriate mailing list. Again, the Zend Framework community does NOT recommend this release for production use. We do, however, recommend evaluating new features in this release with existing and new applications.

Download and test your sites now!

Matthew has the full rundown about it, but, the key new features in 1.8 are:

• Zend_Application for consistent bootstrapping.
• Zend_Tool, a command line client for setting up your project directory and maintaining it.
• Amazon EC2 and S3 support
• Zend_Navigation for menus, sitemaps, breadcrumbs and so on.

And lots of other improvements and bug fixes!

The Zend Framework team was recently notified of an XSS attack vector in its ZendFilterStripTags class. ZendFilterStripTags offers the ability to strip HTML tags from text, but also to selectively choose which tags and specific attributes of those tags to keep.

The XSS attack vector was due to a bug in matching HTML tag attributes to retain. If whitespace was introduced surrounding the attribute assignment operator or the value included newline characters, the attribute would always be included in the final output- even if it was not marked to retain.

A security fix has been created and released with Zend Framework 1.7.7.

Additionally, the fix has been back-ported to the 1.6, 1.5, and 1.0 release branches.

The Zend Framework team strongly recommends upgrading to version 1.7.7. If you cannot upgrade at this time, we recommend exporting from the release branch matching the minor release you are currently using, or downloading the file listed below and pushing it into your Zend Framework installation.

http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/branches/release-1.7/library/Zend/Filter/StripTags.php

Thank you.

,Wil

You can download it from the Zend Framework website. The links at the bottom of the page are direct downloads if you don’t have a Zend account.

32 issues have been fixed in this maintenance release. The highlights for me are:

• ZF-3239: ‘From’ table not available in $parts in ZendDbTableSelect
• ZF-2624: Message-ID getter/setter in ZendMail
• ZF-5352: To,Cc,Bcc email fields injection in ZendMail
• ZF-2559: Email subject encoding bug in Zend_Mail

As you can tell, I’ve been using Zend_Mail recently! There’s also been some useful JQuery bug fixes if you use that.

If you like installing via PEAR, then check out pear.zfcanvas.org.

Download it now!

From the release announcement, key features include:

• Zend_Amf with support for AMF0 and AMF3 protocols
• Support for dijit editor available in the Dojo Toolkit
• ZendServiceTwitter
• ZendX_JQuery in extras library
• Metadata API in Zend_Cache
• Google book search API in Zend_Gdata
• Performance enhancements in ZendLoader, ZendController, and server components
• Zend_Tool in incubator
• ZendTextTable for formatting table using characters
• Zend_ProgressBar
• ZendConfigWriter
• ZendXConsoleUnix_Process in the extras library

Of particular note are the performance enhancements and a new Zend Framework Performance Guide in the manual.

Lots of goodies will be in this release including Flex integration using ZendAmf and also the ability to write to config files using ZendConfig_Writer. Also, support for JQuery will be coming to Zend Extras and also Matthew has been working on some performance enhancements which will be very welcome!