We are in the process of upgrading all of our hosted sites and codebases to Zend Framework 1.8.1. If you are a developer please be sure to update your local copy of the Framework.

Zend released version 1.8 of the Zend Framework around the first of May. Sononaco is upgrading the Zend Framework running on all of our servers. There are several notable changes to the code but there is one issue that needs to be immediately addressed: the Autoloader.

Beginning today (May 13th) we will begin upgrading the Framework on our staging/testing server, (at 66.240.223.252) and our Zend Server. All Zend Server sites have been upgraded to use the 1.8.1 bootstrapper. All site on the “dev” server include any site with the domain name beginning with “dev” or “staging”.

How does this impact you? Unless you ar a developer, not much at all. If you are one of the developers using the Zend Framework then you will need to do a couple of things:

First, update your local working copy of the site. Effective immediately all Application codebases in Subversion should contain the code for the 1.8 Framework. The 1.8.x Bootstrapper code is not compatible with versions of Zend Framework older than 1.8.x!!

If you run the new Application code against the 1.7.x Framework you will see errors so be sure to upgrade your local Framework to 1.8.x.

For the moment we are not upgrading existing bootstrapers or Application layouts to the new Zend_Application_Boostrapper. All projects going forward will contain the new Bootstrapper system.

You can download version 1.8.x of the Zend Framework here.

Jim Plush at Panasonic has published an excellent article on why his company went with the Zend Framework for his enterprise applications. Sononaco is in a similar situation as Jim: we build all kinds of sites of all sizes for all types of clients.

We like to think of ourselves growing along with the language. All of our developers started out embedding PHP inside HTML documents. As PHP started becoming more object-oriented we moved on to writing classes and functions. We have developed and modified other packages such as Serendipity, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, just to name a few.

The move to Zend Framework is not limited to the developer’s perspective. We consider the benefits it brings the client and the user on the front-end as well. Easy search-engine friendly path navigation, integration with external services (YouTube, Twitter, All Things Google) and the fact that you can integrate any JavaScript Framework (we were big MooTools fans) are primary reasons we promote the Zend Framework to our clients. The speed we can develop an application and the ease of updating the Zend Framework on servers are bonus for our developers.