The docs generated by the brand new docu build system PhD ([CVS], [releases]) written by Hanness Magnusson, after several months of development are finally online!

Feel the difference:
   With the old OpenJade/DocBook it took 40-60 minutes to build 'many htmls' version of the manual.
   With PhD it takes less than 2 minutes to build all three formats (`phpweb`, `one big html` and `many htmls`).

Kudos to Bjori!

As you know, there are lies, damned lies and statistics benchmarks.
So here are some more template benchmarks: http://template-bench.iliakantor.ru/, prepared by Ilia Kantor.
Curiously enough, Smarty is on the 5th place, right after the stuff written in C, so think twice before saying it's slow.

IMO it's time to make the development process more organized.
This is my version of what I would like to see as an official set of rules for PHP community.

PHP Seven Commandments

1. Thou shalt obey the Release Master.

2. Thou shalt not commit any patches except for bugfixes after RC stage has started.
Even bugfixes must be discussed with the release master before committing.

3. Remember the coding standards and keep them holy.

4. Thou shalt not forget to add comments to thy code, especially if the code is tricky.

5. Thou shalt not fix a bug only in one of the branches unless it did not exist in the others.
The rule of thumb is to fix it in HEAD first and then backport it.
Forwardporting is not appreciated unless it happens in a matter of hours.

6. Major development goes in HEAD, other branches are created for bugfixes and minor improvements.

7. Thou shalt discuss all new features in internals@.
If nobody pays attention to your proposal, it makes little sense to implement it.

Alexey Rybak has recently rolled out new bugfix release of his template PHP extension - Blitz 0.5.7.
This release fixes a number of minor problems including memory leaks and possible invalid reads and does not affect functionality or speed in any way, so the extension is still blazing fast, but even more stable now.
See more about Blitz here (benchmarks included).