We couldn't be happier to announce that Zend Framework 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available from the Zend Framework download site!
http://framework.zend.com/download An overview of new features (also included in the 1.5 Preview Release): * 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 and OpenID 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 and SlideShare web services This obviously marks a very important step towards a high-quality, highly tested 1.5 GA release. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release in any way: with patches/check ins, documentation/translations, and bug reports. But our work is not yet over! Let's do our best to bring this release to the breaking point to find areas we can improve the release for General Availability. Based on your feedback we will determine in the next few weeks whether we require additional release candidates, so please provide feedback on our issue tracker (http://framework.zend.com/issues) as soon as you can and ask any questions/post your experiences 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. Enjoy 1.5RC1, and see you on the issue tracker, wiki, and mailing lists! ,Wil
